PLOS has the option of double blind review without author line & references so that you can't even guess unless you are very familiar with the subject who the last author might be.
Not sure though how many people have used this option. Jürgen - Jürgen Bosch Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute 615 North Wolfe Street, W8708 Baltimore, MD 21205 Phone: +1-410-614-4742 Lab: +1-410-614-4894 Fax: +1-410-955-3655 http://web.mac.com/bosch_lab/<http://web.me.com/bosch_lab/> On Nov 18, 2010, at 7:21 AM, Anastassis Perrakis wrote: 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.
