Welcome to the SciScore (Ver 3.0 beta) Release Notes

This page is intended to provide you with a summary of the rest of the report and a way to put this particular report in a little bit more context. For this purpose we provide context for your score with the % of papers at which your score sits, a set of information on the right hand side that describes in more detail how the completeness scores are constructed, and a set of colored boxes that denote whether the SciScore tool found or did not find a particular item.

The way that SciScore “knows” that an item was found is that the tool looks for a sentence that matches the item. For example the blinding row will display a blue box if SciScore detects a sentence about blinding. That sentence can be positive “we blinded” or negative “we did not blind”, thus the tool only indicates that a rigor item is addressed not that it is appropriate for the study. If the tool expects that the manuscript contains an item, but it is unable to find that item the box will be orange. For example, if a vertebrate animal is detected but a statement about approval from the institutional animal use committee (IACUC) is absent then the box denoting the IACUC is turned orange. In the full report this row will display “not detected” and specific instructions should follow in the Rigor section of the full report.

For the key resources section there are more options because a sentence that is recognized to have an antibody, for example, may also contain an RRID for that antibody (blue box) or it may just contain the catalog number (yellow box), but it may also just contain a name of the resource (orange box) and SciScore is unsure which RRID fits. SciScore will give the report “full credit” to blue boxed items and partial credit to the yellow boxes, but orange boxes are locations where a the tool identifies a sentence with a key biological resource but insufficient information to identify that resource.

Please note, the tool sometimes misses catalog numbers (sometimes those are just numbers so it gets confused), to help SciScore and your readers, please add RRIDs to the methods section for all key biological resources (as defined by the National Institutes of Health).

The cover page is intended to break down how scoring works in a visual way, so that authors can see more easily where they can change their manuscript to improve their score. We hope this is helpful to authors and reviewers as an overview. For details please see the tables below.