Friday, October 30, 2009

This is dumb

I was reading a paper today, and it indicated in its figure legend that it used CS ChemOffice to draw some organic structures. And I begin to wonder, why the fuck is this information necessary to include in a figure heading?

I mean, I get with proteins and shit that it's important to say what program you used for your refinements and such when presenting a structure because...uh...that's part of your method. But this a) was not presenting novel results--just giving background in the intro and b) is there really any substantial difference between a line drawing made in ChemDraw versus a line drawing made in IsisDraw/BKDraw/ChemSketch/whatever? Why don't we say "I did my word processing in Microsoft Word." Or "I analyzed my data in Microsoft Excel." "I did my lit searches in PubMed." Or "I looked up this reaction on SciFinder". Or "I edited my gel images in Adobe Photoshop". Yeah, I guess you get the picture. I just don't understand why this is in a JBC article.

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