Editor's comment

This month’s highlight is a very different subject to usual. Increasingly, we are becoming acutely aware that the repeatability of experiments is not an absolute given. There are a plethora of studies now showing that original findings are not easily repeated for various reasons. One reason is the methods used. How reliable are they? For a number of methods, the cornerstone aspect is a well characterised antibody.
Eckhardt and colleagues have examined the specificity of a commercially available antibody to human protamine 2. The results are surprising and I won’t spoil the surprise by telling them here. What is clear, though, is that authors and journals need to pay more attention to the methods used for experiments: how robust are they?
In the ESHRE journals, we are meeting these challenges head on by asking reviewers to pay particular attention to the methods section. Importantly we are also open to publication of negative and/or contradictory data, so that the real answers to study questions are uncovered.