Monday, May 29, 2017

I love MCP!


There is no real substance to this post. Just espresso-fueled enthusiasm on this nice rainy holiday morning. Readers of this silly blog have pointed out before things like "wow, you sure seem to read a lot of MCP." Which is true. The other proteomics journals are, of course, awesome. And it makes me even happier to see more and more mainstream biology and medical journals cover proteomics, but I LOVE MCP. Yeah... it is a journal for mass spec nerds. Yeah...the real impact factor is kinda low for just that reason (many serious mass spectrometrists write very little -- this is primarily due to the fact that many mass spectrometrists are in core lab environments or industry), but everything about this journal is what I want it to be as a reader.

Wait -- there will be substance!  The new guidelines for targeted protein quantification, set out by this team of people who know something about the topic...


do kick in this week. Definitely review them before you submit anything featuring targeted quan!  In my humble opinion, they aren't that restrictive. They are more focused on making sure that results can easily be compared and reproduced.

Probably the most common papers to make this dumb blog are MCP Early Edition articles. These are made available ahead of print. If you've submitted papers to MCP you know how hard the review process is. But even the best review panel in the world is going to miss some things once in a while. Twice this year that I'm aware of, an Early Edition article has been pulled after Epub when it was discovered something was missed. Both times what was missed was so relatively minor compared to the story and impact and the overall conclusions of the studies that I just had to laugh about it! (The second one inspired this post today.)

I hope this isn't taken as any sort of criticism of the other journal out there, this isn't mean to be -- it is just a rambling appreciation of the work the editors and review team of this specific journal put into making and keeping this journal at just a ridiculous level of technical quality. In case you're worried you're just being jerks sometimes, I want to state on the record (does this count as a record?) that it is appreciated.

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