Abstract
ASSAY and Drug Development Technologies publishes reviews, original articles, and technical reports; all are represented in the pages that follow. Therefore, this issue provides a useful opportunity to explain how these categories differ and the intended value of each to our readers.
ASSAY is a technology-focused journal, and the content reflects this. However, technology cannot be evaluated or used to its maximum potential without an understanding of context. Thus, technology reviews not only provide an overview of the applications of a specific technology, but also discuss its limitations and compare with alternative methods. We also publish disease-focused reviews, with the intention of providing readers with a thorough understanding of disease biology to allow selection of the most appropriate assays and drug discovery strategy. Some disease models are amenable to interrogation by a wide variety of detection technologies; others are not. Original articles present novel assays and technologies, and discoveries using these methods. In evaluating manuscripts in this category, we look for comparison with similar methods and discoveries as well as experimental validation of the protocols described. This issue also contains technology reports. These provide an opportunity for publication of methods and findings that may be more limited in scope than those in an original article, and include reports of improvements to existing methods.
We strongly encourage submission of technical reports, and will guide authors to refocus a manuscript submitted as an original article if it fits better as a technical report. Often, incremental advances can be useful to many other researchers, yet these are not always submitted for publication due to a perceived “lack of novelty.” This category also provides an ideal forum to publish reports of artifacts and challenges encountered during assay development and HTS. Even (or perhaps especially) if HTS resulted in no confirmed hits, useful lessons may have been learned regarding the propensity of an assay to uncover “false positives” or confirmed hits lacking a useful connection to biology.
There is concern in many circles that scientific literature is skewed toward “positive results,” and that such selective reporting contributes to difficulties encountered by other labs attempting to reproduce the work of others. We invite our contributors to help enlighten our community with an open discussion of the challenges and setbacks that we all encounter, despite our best efforts.