Promoting Coherent Minimum Reporting Guidelines for Biological and Biomedical Investigations: the MIBBI Project

Abstract

<p>To fully understand the context, methods, data and conclusions that pertain to an experiment, one must have access to a range of background information. However, the current diversity of experimental designs and analytical techniques complicates the discovery and evaluation of experimental data; furthermore, the increasing rate of production of those data compounds the problem. Community opinion increasingly favors that a regularized set of the available metadata ('data about the data') pertaining to an experiment^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B1">1, </a>}^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B2">2</a>} be associated with the results, making explicit both the biological and methodological contexts. Many journals and funding agencies now require that authors reporting microarray-based transcriptomics experiments comply with the Minimum Information about a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) checklist^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B3">3</a>} as a prerequisite for publication^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B4">4, </a>}^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B5">5, </a>}^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B6">6, </a>}^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B7">7</a>}. Similarly, minimum information guidelines for reporting proteomics experiments and describing systems biology models are gaining broader support in their respective database communities^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B8">8, </a>}^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B9">9</a>}; and progress is being made toward the standardization of the reporting of clinical trials in the medical literature^{<a href="http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v26/n8/full/nbt.1411.html#B10">10</a>}. Such minimum information checklists promote transparency in experimental reporting, enhance accessibility to data and support effective quality assessment, increasing the general value of a body of work (and the competitiveness of the originators).</p>