FASEB Journals Now Provide Researchers with SciScore Tool

Monday, February 27, 2023
FASEB has a new tool available for researchers to improve the rigor and reproducibility of science submitted to FASEB journals. An automated tool, SciScore, is now integrated into the journals’ submission system, and provides key recommendations and practical steps researchers can take to improve the rigor and reproducibility of their reported science.

“As part of our mission to advance health and well-being by promoting research and education in biological and biomedical sciences, FASEB has long demonstrated a commitment to scientific integrity,” says Darla Henderson, PhD, Director of FASEB Open Science and Research Integrity. “Rigor and reproducibility are a core component of scientific integrity and integrating the SciScore tool into our submission and peer review system provides instant feedback directly to the researcher outlining practical steps they can take to improve reporting.”

SciScore is an automated text-mining tool that evaluates the methods section of scientific articles and checks compliance against recommendations, requirements, and best practices for rigor and reproducibility. The tool generates for researchers both an overall score and a detailed report that provides guidance on potential improvements. FASEB has included the tool in their submission and peer review process as a support tool for authors, available for use at submission and again prior to publication.

“We are very excited to be able to collaborate with our FASEB colleagues and really hope that we can be of service to the authors.” says Anita Bandrowski, CEO of SciCrunch, the company that built SciScore. “At the end of the day, checking and verifying little things like whether an antibody includes enough information to find the reagent is fairly tedious and authors can miss something. However, that missing bit of information can really scuttle another researcher's project, so we hope that these little reminders to make the manuscript better at publication will improve the overall quality of the FASEB journals.” 

Henderson adds “Research integrity and quality are at the center of everything we do. By taking a slightly different approach, giving researchers direct access to the tool, the report, and the score at both initial submission and again pre-publication, we are empowering the community with resources to better understand rigor and reproducibility issues and to enact their own change, much in the same way we give researchers resources to improve data sharing and reuse through our recently launched DataWorks! initiative. FASEB will also be able to review aggregated scores over time and assess how our community is improving in this key metric for research integrity, helping us identify and solve additional researcher needs as we move together towards an open science world.”