Your Research Results Look Compelling, but Are They Reliable?

The Chemistry of Materials journal has added some simple guidelines regarding device and materials reporting to the Information to Authors web page. These guidelines play a key role in informing readers about the reliability of research results. Experts state that the inclusion of this information will encourage future readers to take their work seriously and feel confident that they can use the research results the foundation for their own research programs. The guideline urges authors to include the number of devices examined and the range of results. This can be conveyed in bar graphs to represent data for a statistically meaningful number of samples or could be reported as a specific number of samples with an accompanying specified standard deviation. It also urges the authors to provide sufficient experimental data to reproduce the results and enable valid comparisons with other work.