Hiding stuff in Supp Inf also opens the door to very poor research: as Mike pointed out, a lot of supplements do not see review (editor's and/or reviewers' fault), which invites sloppiness and even intentional 'errors'. I know, I have caught many during
review.
There is an obvious correlation:
The longer the supplements, the more likely will I reject a paper due to grave errors or omissions.Â
Funny, hu?
If a journal insists on putting methods, descriptions, key tables, etc. in a supplement, I ALWAYS review the supplement first, by the way.Â
Heinrich
I agree. "Supplementary material" is being WAY overused, imho. It's done so that printed journals can better compete with PLoS One, PeerJ, etc., and to reduce costs by shortening the hardcopy paper. Also maybe so they don't bore readers with all these boring
details, like the detailed description of a new taxon. Hmm.
All too frequently, I'm settled into my lounge chair, reading a new paper (I often print them instead of reading on-screen), hot coffee on the table next to me, when i come across a text ref. to "Suppl. Fig. S1."Â Er, is it important? If not, then why is it
referred to in the text..? It must be important, yet if it is, then why isn't it included in the paper proper??
So I have to get up, go wake up my desktop, find the PDF, click on the "Fig. S1" link, and.... it doesn't work! Is it my browser? Is the website down? Wasn't the suppl-info uploaded yet? Is it the wrong URL?? So, I go back to reading the paper, wondering what
important figure I'm missing. And then I come to "(see Suppl. Fig. S2)"....
The current publishing model is like a non-swimmer who falls off a boat. Something's gotta change real quick. Maybe he learns to swim, or maybe someone else jumps in and saves him, or maybe.... he is no more.
Certainly some things are appropriate for suppl-info, e.g. 3D models, very large data sets, etc., but that's about it. If it's important to the paper, it should be in the paper. If it's not, then fugetaboutit.
  Paul P.
On Friday, December 6, 2019, 4:41:49 PM UTC, Mike Taylor <sauropoda@gmail.com> wrote:
I beg to differ. By relegating the science to the supp. inf., the authors have invited all sorts of other mishaps as well as the nomenclatural one. It's well known that journals are careless about keeping supplementary information around; I would not want to
put money on it getting properly stored in all the various backup plans people are supposed to use (LOCKSS, etc.). Plus 90% of the time it doesn't go through peer review. In short, supplementary info is grey literature, of no greater reliability or persistence
than, say, an SV-POW! post. Letting the body of a work go into that slushpile is a terrible, terrible thing to do.
-- Mike.
On Fri, 6 Dec 2019 at 16:35, David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at> wrote:
The science is fine; the "supp. inf." _is_ a proper descriptive paper...