The fNIRS Glossary Project

The fNIRS Glossary Project has started!
This blog post contains all the information you need to become an active contributor.

What is the project about?

A common understanding of terminologies is essential at all stages of the research process to facilitate effective scientific communication and to avoid confusions and/or misconceptions. However, this is particularly challenging in rapidly expanding, international fields such as the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) community that includes researchers with different backgrounds (e.g., psychology, neuroscience, engineering, biomedical physics) and fields of applications (e.g., hospital settings, child development research centers, university research labs). Therefore, the fNIRS Glossary Project intends to develop a community-sourced glossary (i.e., useful nomenclature and related symbols) of terms relating to  fNIRS technology including the paradigms of continuous-wave (CW), frequency domain (FD) and time domain (TD) NIRS, the experimental design, pre-processing and data analysis of fNIRS experiments. The glossary will further serve to clarify terminologies to aid new researchers entering the field and experts to communicate efficiently through a common understanding and usage of terminologies.

How can I contribute?

The project will follow a consensus-based methodology to clarify terminologies and to agree on definitions for frequently used terms. Contributions from researchers of all career stages and disciplines are welcome. We plan to record all contributions (original draft preparation; review and editing) by means of the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) statement [1]. Possible contributions consist of but are not limited to writing definitions, commenting on existing definitions, adding alternative definitions where applicable, and suggesting relevant references. All contributors will be invited as co-authors on the fNIRS Glossary Project manuscript which we plan to submit to Neurophotonics as the official journal of the Society for functional near-infrared spectroscopy (SfNIRS). We have already added more than 100 terms waiting for definitions to be added.

Building on the best practices for fNIRS publications paper [2] the fNIRS Glossary Project will provide a community-sourced resource to facilitate education and effective scientific communication within the fNIRS community and related fields. We envisage that the glossary will further lower the barrier to follow and join discussions and thus also help to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion in the rapidly expanding field of fNIRS research.

Interested in contributing? Link to register via Google Forms
Visit our homepage: https://fnirsglossaryproject.github.io/
Contact us: fnirsglossaryproject[at]gmail.
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/fNIRSglossary