Data Reporting Checklists to Maximize your Impact

Abstract

Dear Reader, The pace of scientific discovery and the publication of those discoveries is continuously accelerating. This makes it increasingly challenging to keep abreast of the latest developments and to be sure that reported results are based on data that has been recorded according to best practices in the field. The reliability of reported data is a well-known problem, in large part due to a lack of agreed-upon reporting standards. There are many papers published on the subject; while they offer sage advice from recognized authorities, they aren't necessarily themselves solutions.[1-4] As a service to our authors, reviewers and readers, we introduced the Emerging PV Reports (Figure 1), a collaboration with the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nuremberg for Renewable Energy, Germany. This initiative aims to accelerate the development of emerging PV materials towards market readiness and to improve the reproducibility and quality of the associated data.[5] Following this great initiative, we are now introducing Data Reporting Checklists that are intended to capture key parameters of the described material/device according to best practices in one place. We will ask authors to submit their checklist along with the manuscript. In the initial pilot phase of the project, these checklists will be available to reviewers, but not published. The editorial team expect that phase two of the project will be rolled out in early 2022, and thereafter the checklists will be published alongside the relevant manuscripts. This project is a joint effort among Wiley's Materials Science & Physics and Chemistry journals, and our first checklists are for original Research Articles covering energy storage and efficiency and/or stability-related investigations of photovoltaic devices. For this reason, Advanced Energy Materials will be the first of our journals to roll out the Data Reporting Checklists, with the other journals following in due course – watch this space! These checklists were developed together with recognized experts in their fields, and we are extremely grateful for the constructive discussion, in particular with Volker Presser (INM Saarbrücken), Qiang Zhang (Tsinghua University), and Patrik Johansson (Chalmers University) for the battery checklist; and with Christoph Brabec and Osbel Almora (both University of Erlangen Nuremberg) as well as Nikos Kopidakis (NREL) for the solar cell checklist. Apart from making it easier for you as author to know what our minimal data requirements are prior to manuscript submission, and for you as reviewer to see at a glance whether all the essential measurements have been made, the Data Reporting Checklists will also have other benefits. With the advent of the Open Research and specifically the Open Data movement, we are convinced that ensuring completeness of datasets for newly developed materials and devices not only facilitates comparability and reproducibility of results, but can also help readers to quickly discover and appreciate the impact of your work. In other words: these Data Reporting Checklists can add significant value to your study after publication as well! Especially in very active research fields that move at unparalleled pace, such as energy research in general, or solid-state batteries in particular, the rate of scientific progress is intertwined with the availability of complete datasets, which enable better reproducibility of results. Please be assured that we would like this additional part of the submission process to be as seamless as possible. Completing these Data Reporting Checklists takes a few minutes only on average and we will continue to optimize the integration of these checklists into our submission workflows as our manuscript submission systems evolve. Advanced Energy Materials will be spearheading this approach and our sister journals, in particular Advanced Energy and Sustainability Research, Batteries & Supercaps, Solar RRL, ChemSusChem, and more, will join soon! As shown, these checklists have been created in collaboration with researchers who are experts in their fields and with your best interests in mind. However, because research is intrinsically dynamic and new areas will develop, the lists will change over time. So, please use these checklists and share your feedback with us, as author and as reviewer, so we can develop them further. Best regards, Till von Graberg on behalf of the Editorial Team of Advanced Energy Materials