A note on interpreting your SciScore report.

SciScore scores all papers on a scale of 1-10, based on the expectation that the methods section of your paper contains statements about sex of subjects, blinding, randomization of subjects, and catalog numbers and RRIDs for all research resources. If the tool does not find a criterion, such as blinding, it will state "not detected" and it will take off points. If it finds a sentence that matches a criterion "female rats were used..." then the sentence will be provided in the report and the score will increase. If SciScore deems that a criterion is "not applicable" to the study, then points will not be removed from the report. The average SciScore across all journals in PubMed Central was 4.2 in 2019, for a more granular breakdown please see the following paper (Menke et al, 2020; PMID:33196023).

SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore is not a substitute for expert review. SciScore checks to make sure that rigor criteria are addressed by authors. SciScore does not guarantee that the rigor criteria it detects are appropriate for a particular study. SciScore also checks for the presence and correctness of several unique identifiers, including RRIDs (research resource identifiers) in the manuscript, detects sentences that appear to be missing RRIDs, and can even suggest RRIDs under certain circumstances. All RRID suggestions should be verified; only the author can know whether the suggestions are correct.

Rigor Table:

In the rigor table (Table 1), SciScore highlights sentences that include various elements of rigor. SciScore looks for items listed on the report and when an item is detected, the sentence is included, when an item is not detected, the tool reports "not detected". It is possible that a criterion is not necessary for a particular manuscript. In these cases, the score is not decreased by a "not detected". For example, if an IRB section is not filled in, but no animals or human participants are detected.

The rigor items detected in this version of SciScore include the following:

Ethical Approval: expected when euthanasia or vertebrate organism is detected

  • Institutional Review Board Statement

  • Consent Statement

    • MDAR, CONSORT
    • Example: All infants were enrolled with informed parental permission under a protocol that was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Boards of the respective study sites.

  • Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee Statement

    • MDAR, ARRIVE
    • Example: All animal experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations and were approved by the University of Pennsylvania Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC).

  • Field Sample Permit

    • MDAR
    • Example: Permission to conduct field surveys on each location was given by the individual landowners concerned, and by the regulatory authority (Natural England) in those situations where the field site was afforded protected status.

  • Euthanasia

    • MDAR
    • Example: Mice were deeply anesthetized by intraperitoneal injection of sodium thiopental before decapitation, followed by brain extraction.

  • Study Participation

    • Inclusion & Exclusion Criteria
      • MDAR, NIH, CONSORT
      • Example: Subjects were eligible for the cross-sectional study if they were fluent in English and had a sexual partner (SP) in the previous 18 months and ineligible if they were post-menopausal or had undergone a sex change.
    • Attrition
      • MDAR
      • Example: Of these, 21 ticks could not be removed from the birds and 162 ticks were lost due to technical problems during nucleic acid extraction, resulting in 1,150 ticks available for analysis.

  • Sex as a biological variable

    • MDAR, NIH, CONSORT, ARRIVE
    • Example: All females were of reproductive age and none were on progestin.

  • Subject Demographics

    • Age
      • MDAR, ARRIVE
      • Example: Their age varied from 19 to 47 years (mean 26.3 , ssd 6.4).
    • Weight
      • MDAR, ARRIVE
      • Example: Six healthy adult rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) of Chinese origin (4–8 kg, three males and three females, 4–8 years old).

  • Randomization of subjects into groups

    • MDAR, NIH, CONSORT, ARRIVE
    • Example: Animals were assigned to experimental groups using simple randomization.

  • Blinding of investigator or analysis

    • MDAR, NIH, CONSORT, ARRIVE
    • Example: Responses were then scored by an experimenter blinded to injection condition and experimental cohort.

  • Power analysis for group size

    • MDAR, NIH, CONSORT, ARRIVE
    • Example: Sample size was based on estimations by power analysis with a level of significance of 0.05 and a power of 0.9.

  • Replication Information

    • Number of replications
      • MDAR
      • Example: Bioassays were replicated three times.

  • Type of replication

    • MDAR
    • Example: This can be a biological or technical replicate.

  • Cell line Confirmation: expected when a cell line is detected

    • Cell Line Authentication
      • MDAR, NIH
      • Example: MOLM-14 cells were authenticated by STR profiling and flow cytometry.
    • Cell Line Contamination Check
      • MDAR, NIH
      • Example: All cell lines were obtained from ATCC and tested negative for mycoplasma contamination.

  • Code Information: Code Availability

  • Data Information: Data Availability

    • MDAR
    • Example: dbSNP, dbVar identifiers.

Scoring for Rigor Table (total 5 points):

The rigor table makes up 5 points of the total score. Generally, adding more rigor criteria such as URLs to tools or protocols will increase points for this section.