Key Resources Table

The key resources table (Table 2), contains:

  1. Sentences that “should” have RRIDs

  2. Key biological resources detected (names of cell lines or antibodies)

  3. RRIDs - if detected, these are checked / validated by SciScore

RRIDs are unique identifiers for reagents and other resources that largely overlap with the resource types that have been labeled as particularly problematic by the National Institutes of Health in recent changes to their grant review criteria, please see "key biological resources", e.g., antibodies, cell lines and transgenic organisms. The RRID initiative is led by journals and community repositories that provide persistent, unique identifiers to their resources, such as transgenic mice, salamanders, antibodies, cell lines, plasmids and software projects such as statistical software. RRIDs are described on the rrids.org website and in a primer by Bandrowski and Martone in 2016.

RRIDs are unique numbers that resolve to a particular database record, for example, the RRID:CVCL_0063 resolves to this record for a cell line (Cellosaurus community repository): https://web.expasy.org/cellosaurus/CVCL_0063.

  • How does it work? The information in the Cellosaurus database (https://web.expasy.org/cellosaurus/) is structured and curated by Cellosaurus staff, the authority for cell lines (all RRIDs have an authority specific for the resource type). If authors use this RRID, then SciScore will ask the database about that particular identifier. In cases where a RRID fails to resolve (i.e. database has no record of that identifier, most likely due to a typo), SciScore will display an “unresolved” error message in red. If an RRID was recently submitted to the authority by authors, it often takes a week or more to become available in the database, thus exercising caution in the interpretation of the SciScore report in cases of newly minted RRIDs is advisable.

Sentences that ‘should have RRIDs’ are detected by SciScore using patterns in sentences that are similar to how each resource is commonly described in published papers. A sentence that describes one or more antibodies may be detected by SciScore and this will be placed into the table without a corresponding RRID. SciScore will then attempt to find the name, catalog number, and vendor of the resource. In cases where the tool is relatively confident, it will suggest an RRID (this will contain the word “suggestion” and be in gray), as a courtesy. A link is provided, so authors can quickly verify whether the correct RRID was suggested.

Note of caution: Please verify all RRID suggestions, only the author can know whether suggestions are correct.

Would you like to know more about one of the other two tables in the report, Rigor and Statistics, then click the links below: