Piekniewska Agata, Anderson Nathan, Roelandse Martijn, Lloyd K C Kent, Korf Ian, Voss S Randal, de Castro Giovanni, Magnani Diogo M, Varga Zoltan, James-Zorn Christina, Horb Marko, Grethe Jeffery S, Bandrowski Anita
SciCrunch Inc.
martijnroelandse.dev.
bioRxiv. 2024 Jan 16:2024.01.15.575636. doi: 10.1101/2024.01.15.575636.
Research resources like transgenic animals and antibodies are the workhorses of biomedicine, enabling investigators to relatively easily study specific disease conditions. As key biological resources, transgenic animals and antibodies are often validated, maintained, and distributed from university based stock centers. As these centers heavily rely largely on grant funding, it is critical that they are cited by investigators so that usage can be tracked. However, unlike systems for tracking the impact of papers, the conventions and systems for tracking key resource usage and impact lag behind. Previous studies have shown that about 50% of the resources are not findable, making the studies they are supporting irreproducible, but also makes tracking resources difficult. The RRID project is filling this gap by working with journals and resource providers to improve citation practices and to track the usage of these key resources. Here, we reviewed 10 years of citation practices for five university based stock centers, characterizing each reference into two broad categories: findable (authors could use the RRID, stock number, or full name) and not findable (authors could use a nickname or a common name that is not unique to the resource). The data revealed that when stock centers asked their communities to cite resources by RRID, in addition to helping stock centers more easily track resource usage by increasing the number of RRID papers, authors shifted from citing resources predominantly by nickname (50% of the time) to citing them by one of the findable categories (85%) in a matter of several years. In the case of one stock center, the MMRRC, the improvement in findability is also associated with improvements in the adherence to NIH rigor criteria, as determined by a significant increase in the Rigor and Transparency Index for studies using MMRRC mice. From this data, it was not possible to determine whether outreach to authors or changes to stock center websites drove better citation practices, but findability of research resources and rigor adherence was improved.
转基因动物和抗体等研究资源是生物医学的主力军，使研究人员能够相对轻松地研究特定疾病状况。作为关键的生物资源，转基因动物和抗体通常由大学的库存中心进行验证、保存和分发。由于这些中心在很大程度上严重依赖资助资金，因此研究人员对它们进行引用至关重要，以便能够追踪使用情况。然而，与追踪论文影响力的系统不同，追踪关键资源使用情况和影响力的惯例和系统滞后。先前的研究表明，约50%的资源无法被找到，这不仅使得它们所支持的研究无法重复，也使得追踪资源变得困难。RRID项目正在通过与期刊和资源提供者合作来填补这一空白，以改进引用做法并追踪这些关键资源的使用情况。在此，我们回顾了五个大学库存中心十年的引用做法，将每条参考文献分为两大类：可找到的（作者可以使用RRID、库存编号或全名）和不可找到的（作者可以使用昵称或并非该资源独有的通用名称）。数据显示，当库存中心要求其社区通过RRID引用资源时，除了通过增加RRID论文的数量帮助库存中心更轻松地追踪资源使用情况外，作者在几年内从主要通过昵称引用资源（约50%的时间）转变为通过可找到的类别之一引用资源（约85%）。就一个库存中心MMRRC而言，可找到性的提高也与遵守美国国立卫生研究院严格标准的情况改善相关，这由使用MMRRC小鼠的研究的严格性和透明度指数显著提高所确定。从这些数据中，无法确定是对作者的宣传还是库存中心网站的变化推动了更好的引用做法，但研究资源的可找到性和对严格性的遵守情况得到了改善。
