As a complement or appendix to the printed article, supplemental material represents a powerful advantage of online publishing, allowing authors to present supporting evidence, such as movies and large data sets, that cannot be included within printed journal pages.Unfortunately, over the years supplemental material has evolved into a seemingly limitless repository for additional "stuff": a wide range of control experiments, preliminary next-step experiments, data responding to specific reviewers concerns, results that just "don't fit" within the main paper, extended discussions, and methodological details. It has become a mechanism for expanding the overall content of a paper without any delineated change in editorial standards. In some cases where length limits are particularly strict, even major points in the paper can be based on experiments that only appear in the supplement.
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