The prestigious journals in cell biology, hematology, immunology, etc. pick their peer reviewers for primary expertise in these individual fields, not for in-depth knowledge of cytometry, flow or otherwise. As cytometry becomes easier to do (or appears easier to do) fewer of the peer reviewers possess such in-depth knowledge, having abandoned the field to their graduate students and postdocs. And the graduate students and postdocs figure they don't have to know much more than their bosses, since the folks at the flow resource will solve most of their problems for them. So, even if the primary reviewer runs a manuscript by a graduate student or postdoc who supposedly knows more about cytometry, the likelihood is that egregious errors in the cytometry will sail right through if the rest of the science looks right. As a general rule, reviewers for Cytometry and Communications in Clinical Cytometry catch the errors in cytometry; unfortunately, a lot of the manuscripts that come to these journals have been rejected by more prestigious journals because there were problems with the rest of the science. It's nice that, within ISAC and the cytometry community, we continue to address the question of how best to present and display results of experiments involving cytometry. However, even if we produce all the white papers we want on the subject, it is unlikely that they will be read by or exert influence on editors and reviewers convinced that cytometry is unimportant enough to be left to the lower echelons. The best we can do is educate our collaborators and those who use our facilities; I'll take my best shot at this in the 4th Edition of Practical Flow Cytometry, but I don't have a lot of people running samples on my instruments. Those of you who do may have more influence. -Howard
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