2. A Blog about the world of Image and Flow Cytometry. Coming to you from the core facility at the Univer
of Chicago
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Core Facility Acknowledgment Accounting 101 - How to
make sure your work is being recognized.
A recent article in Biotechniques has spurred
some interesting discussions in the Academic
Core Facility (or as we cytometry cores like to
call them, Shared Resource Laboratories ‐
SRLs) world. The gist of the article states that
all too often core facilities are not properly
acknowledged in publications that clearly are
using the services provided by their
institutional cores. The flip‐side of this
argument is that investigators are already
paying for the services rendered so that fee is
essentially all the "acknowledgment" that is
required. However, since many times core
facilities are partially funded by government
agencies, the services (and more accurately
the service recharge rates) are being
subsidized. Therefore,
the payment isn't payment enough.
Whether you agree or disagree with this basic
tenet is really beyond the scope of this post. What I'd like to share here is my way of
fostering the proper relationship with my users such that they feel compelled to
acknowledge the excellent work of the core instead of feeling obligated to do so.
What follows is basically a three‐part approach to accomplishing the goal of being
acknowledged as a core facility in publications that utilize your services. The reason you
may wish to do this could vary, but likely involve justification of your core facility's
BioTechniques Article on SRL Attribution
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Adapted From:
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3. Why
• Support Grant Justification
– Centers, Research Projects
• Facility impact
– I/O calculations
– = Institutional cost per publication
• Grant proposals (instrumentation, research
projects, support center grants)
• Personal edification
Total Subsidy ($)
# of Publications
4. What to track - input
• What is the annual subsidy of the core?
– Operating subsidy – subsidize direct costs of
operating the facility – Salary/fringe, supplies,
maintenance, etc..
– Overhead subsidy – lab space, utilities,
administration, IT, etc…
• Annual capital allotment.
5. What to track - output
• Publications utilizing your core.
– Tracking a center support grant by its number
– Facility technology keywords (flow cytometry, FACS,
MACS, ImageStream, Luminex, beads, CyTOF, mass
cytometry, cytometry, etc…)
– Institution name gate or known external user names.
• Publications acknowledging your core
– Track the facility name or variations of the name (flow
cytometry core facility, FACS facility, flow core,
cytometry lab, etc…)
– Track individual lab member names
6. Find publications
• PubMed searches can be saved and
notifications can be created
• Google scholar – collates publications outside
of PubMed, including book chapters.
• Follow investigators on Research Gate or
through your institutional news outlets
12. Results
• Anecdotally, it seems to be working.
• First 6 months monitoring, I saw ZERO
acknowledgements
• Most recent 6 months, I see about 25% (2 papers
I was an author…)
• However, the conversation has been broached
and people are becoming aware.
• Emails are very well received and investigators
are even apologetic when failing to acknowledge.
13. Conclusions
• Don’t sit back and wait for people to
acknowledge.
• Find the publications
• Encourage good behavior
• Correct behavior you’d like to change
• Quantitate all the things!
14. Thanks
If you’d like to reproduce these methods at your own institution, please acknowledge
the University of Chicago Flow Cytometry Facility when your administrators shower
you with accolades. : )
