Chromatography Forum

Is anyone aware of any reviews or publications by individuals or professional groups or journals (i.e., ASMS) that contain guidelines on what information needs to be included in the materials and methods section in order to make a GCMS or LCMS method reasonably replicable? For example, that the column information needs to include the manufacturer, ID, length, and pore size for LC columns.

I am tired of reading manuscripts that are missing crucial aspects of the method. And as a peer reviewer, it would be nice to have a document to direct authors to for information.

Thank you!

Journal of Analytical Toxicology has method validation requirements for submitted manuscripts. I am not sure that they are appropriate for all types of research.

https://academic.oup.com/jat/pages/gene ... Validation

Oh, exasperation! Yes, yes, yes! If there were a big button which you could press, that would cause all publications to disappear if they are unreproducible because they are missing completely crucial bits of method, then were anyone to press it, vast swathes of innocent bystanders in the vicinity of university libraries would be caught in the inrush of displaced air, and find themselves swirling off like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. A vista of empty shelves would open, surpassing the hopes and dreams of the most shelf-deprived librarian. Yottabytes of spare disk-space would appear at publishers' servers, the world over.

It never fails to amaze me that people will report in detail exactly what instrument they used, down to the model-numbers of the LC pumps, and fail to mention the column. Or they'll tell us the column but not mention the gradient or solvents. Some journals are worse than others. As a rule of thumb, the "better" the journal, the less chance there is that (a) the method will be described, or (b) that it will actually work.

Thank you, if you're a peer reviewer, for your efforts in spotting these things. Most reviewers apparently don't bother looking at the methods, which are often buried in the supplementary materials. There isn't much kudos in writing methods sections, reviewers and editors haven't a clue what the methods mean, and project leaders get excited about the results, not the details of the column. And it's easy to forget a critical detail. Good guidelines would be a great thing.

lmh, well said.

The problem seems to have got worse as automated instruments and data crunching software have allowed non-chemists to do analyses on instruments that to them are black boxes using methods that they do not understand.