Briefings in Bioinformatics is a review journal and does not publish original research. The aim of Briefings in Bioinformatics is to provide an indispensable resource for the experimental practitioner seeking awareness of the disparate sources of data and analytical tools of contemporary biology, biotechnology and medicine based on the molecular level. This includes all areas of genomics, proteomics, lipidomics, glycomics, metabolomics, interactomics and network biology, imaging, systems biology, phenomics, chemoinformatics, computational biology and clinical/medical informatics that have a molecular foundation to the study. Large-scale instrumentation and computerisation is reducing the time that needs to be spent in the laboratory. Instead, the rate-limiting step is the analysis and interpretation of data. The journal provides topical reviews of new methodologies as they become established. Reviews of the related education and training in the biomedical sciences are included in the scope. The Editors welcome the submission of review papers and case studies for publication. We publish reviews of clearly defined subject areas for both experimental biologists and for bioinformatics specialists. Reviews may be broader or more narrowly focussed but must cover a variety of approaches to a very well specified biological problem or research area. The underlying concepts must be clearly explained along with the selection of the correct tools for a problem, their limitations, and the interpretation of the results. Descriptions of existing analytical solutions of biological problems should be transparent and user friendly and may include mathematical and statistical methods for high dimensional and high throughput data. We do not publish work on new methods that have not yet been described elsewhere. At any stage of the review process a submitted manuscript will be rejected if we determine that it is an original research article. Some areas that members of the Editorial Board have identified as important and presently under represented in the pages of the Journal include the complex fields of epigenetics and the construction of evolutionary models and the elucidation of evolutionary relationships. Methodological approaches of interest include software comparison and benchmarking, data cleaning and curation, accuracy of predicted and extracted information, ontologies and text-mining, solutions that allow for the large-scale analysis of biological data in reasonable time (high performance computing solutions and cloud systems), standards, training and change management activities, and the determination of causal relationships from data. Ontologies for semantic-based analysis of molecular data and interaction networks, methods and tools for the automatic or semiautomatic annotation of biological data with terms extracted from ontologies, and methods and tools for enrichment analysis are all relevant to the objectives. Articles focusing on illuminating bottleneck problems in important bioinformatics approaches will be especially helpful to readers. There should be more studies focussing on the replicability and reproducibility of bioinformatics methodologies and realistic sample sizes required for this. We encourage papers that provide an independent evaluation of software tools for common tasks. In bioinformatics there are typically multiple different tools and parameter settings that can be selected for a given problem and these should evaluated and compared to one another using simulation if appropriate, preferably by authors who are not originators of the software. As the science advances details of what is important changes and the Editors, Editorial Board and Reviewers will be flexible in their policies. Read Less

Briefings in Bioinformatics is a review journal and does not publish original research. The aim of Briefings in Bioinformatics is to provide an indispensable resource for the experimental practitioner seeking awareness of the disparate sources of data and analytical tools of c...... Read More