Common Sense for the Biochemist

A KEY part of experimental design is that the experiment must be reproducible. So how the hell can a respectable academic journal publish a paper with microarray results that are blatantly non-repeatable! Now that I have said that let me explain: I was reading through a research article that was published this year (2005) in a mainstream academic journal, not the Proceedings of the National Academy of Lesothan Plant Biologists, that dealt with a considerable chunk of microarray data (WooHoo! megabyte upon megabyte of numbers to be crunched and statistically analyzed!). We are talking analysis of 100+ slides here. The paper gave a web address that should contain all the microarray protocols, all the MIAME compliant data, and the raw TIF files for all of the slides. Actually, the paper said that this particular web address WILL contain all the necessary data. So, I type in the link exactly as it appeared in the paper and I got . . . a 404 - page doesn't exist error. Well, I finally figured the web address that got me where they wanted me to go to (the first letter of the page name should have been capitalized) and I got . . .a general academic lab page with no mention whatsoever about a microarray experiment. No protocols, no text tab delimited files full of data, no raw TIF files . . .NOTHING!!!!!! This paper has been PUBLISHED for a couple of months, its not like it was just put up on the journal's website as an advanced online publication yesterday. So my question to all of you out there that participate in peer review is - HOW THE HELL DO YOU ACCEPT A PAPER FOR PUBLISHING WITH SUCH A BLATENT ERROR (THE WEB ADDRESS), AND THEN TRUST THE AUTHORS TO RELEASE ALL THE DATA AFTER THE PAPER IS ACCEPTED? Its nice to see how the authors interpret their data, but I want to do my own interpretation. To me, this experiment is worthless. How can you repeat something when you don't have the data or protocols to compare against. My message for all peer reviewers out there (and me too someday) is please, make sure the paper is in a reasonably publishable form and all the necessary data is available before you accept it. P.S. I have nothing against the authors of this article, actually, the corresponding author is a pretty respectable guy. My research does not compete with theirs. However, my abilities to interpret their data and protocols could be very helpful to me and possibly reinforce their data. Thanks I just had to get that off my chest and yes I am mindful of my own post yesterday.