Journal blogs don’t for the most part allow anonymous commenting. You think people would sign their names to such comments? Gossip blogs are just that, gossip.

Anyhow, I thought this was what professional meetings (GRC, Keystone, society, the like) were for, right? To exchange dirt on people in the field?

ps. if it comes to that, contacting the journal can be effective I think.

If so, how bad? Not worth contacting the journal over I assume?

I’ll put on my moral absolutist Janet/writedit/s.rivlin pose for a minnit. Suppose there were a journal blog or per-article discussion like PLOS One that coturnix is always on about or even a field gossip blog. And you posted the “they sent me junk” accusation with the lab involved made obvious. And suppose everyone else who tried to request reagents also chimed in with “gee I got a bogus response too”? How long would it take to eliminate that crap?

I think we all have. I remember one situation as a post-doc where I requested a particular cDNA clone from someone, and she rapidly and politely sent me a tube of DNA. It was pBluescript with no insert. So I sent a polite e-mail informing her of this, and quickly received an apologetic e-mail that a “technician” must have made a mistake, and that a new aliquot was on its way. New aliquot was also pBluescript. “So sorry. First-year grad student must have made a mistake.” Next aliquot: still empty vector. I think we gave up and just PCRed it up. But she won, at least in her own perception, because she slowed me down by about six months from working with that cDNA.

cDNA < antibodies < cell line

- i.e. you might get a cDNA, but after that it gets really tough.

Another problem is that whether you can get the stuff often depends on who you are. If you are a “player” you have a shot at getting your request taken seriously, provided they are not afraid of you as a direct rival. If you are a relative nobody you basically go to the back of the queue. And I’ve been sent a few “oops-no DNA in that cDNA, funny that” samples in my time, too.

you are emphatically correct in identifying additional reasons we have Methods sections in the first place and indeed why scientists should share critical resources.

but I’ll go right out on the limb and suggest that, particularly in what we regard as some of the hottest science these days, labs are motivated to ignore reagent requests in some part because they don’t want to be falsified. “what? those cheaters!” you say. well yes. I’m in an area myself where experiments “working” or “not working” in the sense of antibodies being “no good”, conditions not right, etc are rare. however, I am familiar with other types of work in which the appearance of one lab “getting it to work” while another cannot is not ALWAYS evidence of fiction. so it can be complicated. provision of the material may end up being a long and lengthy process of helping someone replicate your work…