I like the online methods sections with e.g. Nature papers that also
come with the pdf - they also count for citations, the citations are
not within the manuscript allowance on numbers, they get peer
reviewed and they actually leave quite a lot of space for readers to
understand the experiments and for authors to cite methods properly.
Easy fix in my mind.
What Poul says about Nature, which is also my understanding, is in
sharp contrast with the Cell group policy:
Supplemental References
Literature citations from within the Supplemental Information and
unique to the Supplemental Information should be listed as
Supplemental References. References that are already included in the
main body of the paper should not be listed again. Please note that
as references in Supplemental Information do not contribute towards
citation measures for those papers, authors are encouraged, when
possible, to include references in the main body of the paper.
My experience with Elsevier, is that they like to listen to feedback
and appreciate it.
Nature seems to have fixed the problem with citations in Methods in a
proper manner (which is largely true for all NPG journals, I think, at
least NSMB will also do the Online Methods trick!).
So, an important step would be that we as a community, take the steps
to get everybody to follow that.
So, lets start a petition?
Maybe Victor that started this important thread could champion this
and see it to an end !!!
A.
