Eligibility for Inclusion

BrainMap databases accept:

When papers partially meet these criteria, only the conditions and experiments that qualify should be coded. In that case, be sure to make a note about which parts were excluded and which criteria were not met.

Human Neuroimaging

BrainMap is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (R01-MH074457) to compile, code and share neuroimaging results that enable meta-analysis of studies of human brain function and structure in healthy and diseased subjects.

Peer-Reviewed English-Language Publications

Articles must be peer-reviewed and published. For quality assurance purposes, accepted but currently unpublished articles may be submitted for coding review using the manuscript pdf, but should be updated once published. As the English-language scientific literature is globally recognized as the most rigorous, we don't include articles in other languages.

Whole-Brain Imaging and Analysis

The imaging modality used should cover the entire brain of the subjects. However the whole-brain imaging criteria is somewhat lenient; we do not exclude papers for incomplete coverage of the cerebellum due to a scanner's limited field of view. This criteria is primarily concerned with excluding studies which intentionally restrict the image acquisition to pre-selected regions of interest.

Analysis must compute SPI in a voxel-wise manner over the whole brain. So experiments which restrict the analysis to particular regions are excluded. This includes studies which use region of interest (ROI), volume of interest (VOI), scaled sub-profile modelling (SSM), topo­graphy, contour, surface-based or other­wise mask-based techniques. Analyses that require a seed ROI, such as psycho­physiological inter­action (PPI) or small-volume correction (SVC) experiments are also excluded.

Coordinate-Based Results in a Standard Space

BrainMap databases do not include images, neither raw scanner data nor analyzed SPIs, only the reduced results of the coordinates of the local maxima of task activation or structural atrophy.

Coordinates must be in a standard reference space, such as MNI or Talairach space. These reference spaces are not the same and must be identified to allow coordinates to be directly compared in meta-analyses.

Structural papers must use a morphometry methodology that spatially normalizes all subject images, like voxel-based morphometry (VBM).

For more information on registration, transforms, brain templates and reference spaces, see this video from Scribe's training video page:

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