Encouraging responsible reporting practices in the Instructions to Authors of neuroscience and physiology journals: There is room to improve

Journals can substantially influence the quality of research reports by including responsible reporting practices in their Instructions to Authors. We assessed the extent to which 100 journals in neuroscience and physiology required authors to report methods and results in a rigorous and transparent way. For each journal, Instructions to Authors and any referenced reporting guideline or checklist were downloaded from journal websites. Twenty-two questions were developed to assess how journal Instructions to Authors address fundamental aspects of rigor and transparency in five key reporting areas. Journal Instructions to Authors and all referenced external guidelines and checklists were audited against these 22 questions. Of the full sample of 100 Instructions to Authors, 34 did not reference any external reporting guideline or checklist. Reporting whether clinical trial protocols were pre-registered was required by 49 journals and encouraged by 7 others. Making data publicly available was encouraged by 64 journals; making (processing or statistical) code publicly available was encouraged by *30 of the journals. Other responsible reporting practices were mentioned by less than 20 of the journals. Journals can improve the quality of research reports by mandating, or at least encouraging, the responsible reporting practices highlighted here

Response to: Premature deaths attributed to ambient air pollutants: let us interpret the Robins-Greenland theorem correctly.

We thank Morfeld and Erren for their continued interest in the WHO Health risks of air pollution in Europe (HRAPIE) report (WHO Regional Office for Europe 2013). The key point of contention seems to be the interpretation of the numbers of ‘premature deaths’ associated with air pollution (or any other) exposure. In the IJPH article that is at the basis of the two letters written by Morfeld and Erren (Heroux et al. 2015), the limitations of calculating and using numbers of ‘premature deaths’ were perhaps not sufficiently explained. We elaborated on this in our first response (Heroux et al. 2016), arguing that the criticized calculation of ‘premature deaths’ produces a reasonable albeit ambiguous estimate, for which reason calculation of years of life lost is a more preferable approach. We would like to point out that the HRAPIE report really is about identification of concentration–response functions to be further used in health impact assessments, and therefore did not pretend to provide a discussion of estimating etiologic fractions. Morfeld and Erren single out the one numerical example of an impact assessment given in our paper, and that example was not a result from the HRAPIE work itself but a quote from a report from the European Commission (2013). We never intended to give the impression that these numbers refer to individually identifiable, attributable deaths, however.Peer reviewe

Motor unit territories in human genioglossus estimated with multichannel intramuscular electrodes

The discharge patterns of genioglossus motor units during breathing have been well-characterized in previous studies, but their localization and territories are not known. In this study, we used two newly developed intramuscular multichannel electrodes to estimate the territories of genioglossus motor units in the anterior and posterior regions of the muscle. Seven healthy men participated. Each electrode contained fifteen bipolar channels, separated by 1 mm, and was inserted percutaneously below the chin, perpendicular to the skin, to a depth of 36 mm. Single motor unit activity was recorded with subjects awake, supine, and breathing quietly through a nasal mask for 180 s. Motor unit territories were estimated from the spike-triggered averages of the electromyographic signal from each channel. A total of 30 motor units were identified: 22 expiratory tonic, 1 expiratory phasic, 2 tonic, 3 inspiratory tonic, and 2 inspiratory phasic. Motor units appeared to be clustered based on unit type, with peak activities for expiratory units predominantly located in the anterior and superficial fibers of genioglossus and inspiratory units in the posterior region. Of these motor unit types, expiratory tonic units had the largest estimated territory, a mean 11.3 mm (SD 1.9). Estimated territories of inspiratory motor units ranged from 3 to 6 mm. In accordance with the distribution of motor unit types, the estimated territory of genioglossus motor units varied along the sagittal plane, decreasing from anterior to posterior. Our findings suggest that genioglossus motor units have large territories relative to the cross-sectional size of the muscle

Hough-Transform-Based Interpolation Scheme for Generating Accurate Dense Spatial Maps of Air Pollutants from Sparse Sensing

Part 2: Air and ClimateInternational audienceAir pollution is a significant health risk factor and causes many negative effects on the environment. Thus, arises the need for studying and assessing air-quality. Today, air-pollution assessment is mostly based on data acquired from Air Quality Monitoring (AQM) stations. These AQM stations provide continuous measurements and considered to be accurate; however, they are expensive to build and operate, thus scattered sparingly. To cope with this limitation, typically, the information obtained from those measurements is generalized with interpolation methods such as IDW or Kriging. Yet, the mathematical basis of those schemes defines that pollution extremum values are obtained at the measuring points. In addition, they are not considering the location of the pollution source or any physicochemical characteristics of pollutant hence do not reveal the real spatial air-pollution patterns. This research introduces a new interpolation scheme which breaks the interpolation process into two stages. At the first stage, the source of pollution and its estimated emission rate are inferred through a detection procedure which is based on the Hough Transform. At the second stage, based on the detected source location and emission, spatial dense pollution maps are created. The method requires, for its computation, to assume a dispersion model. To this end, any model can be used as sophisticated as it may be. Spatial maps created with simplified dispersion models in a computational simulation, show that the suggested interpolation scheme manages to create more accurate and more physically reasonable maps than the state-of-the-art