Declaring the Commercial Source and Grade of Chemicals, and Equipment, in a Scientific Paper

Scientific biomedical papers widely use chemicals, reagents and/or equipment. These are described in the materials and methods section. The source of these methodological props needs to be precisely defined for scientific and proprietary reasons. The commercial source or grade of a chemical can affect the quality and outcome of an analysis, e.g. in plant tissue culture. Failure to recognize the commercial source deprives a company of its due proprietary investment in a product, reduces reproducibility and thus constitutes an incomplete or erroneous methodology. Such errors should be corrected, which should be the responsibility of authors, editors and publishers.