![]() ![]() Table 1 also shows the fraction of the materials and methods section that was devoted to imaging in the 185 articles that contained images. It is also important to note that many of the articles contained supplemental videos, further stressing the importance of imaging in biomedical research. While the number of figures in an article is a coarse metric that does not address how critical the information provided in a figure is for the conclusions reported in the article, it is an objective and quantifiable metric. It should be noted that western blots and similar figures were not considered as images for the purposes of this study (see Materials and methods for details).Īrticles about developmental biology and cell biology contained the highest proportion on images, whereas articles about immunology had the lowest ( Table 1). Most of the images had been acquired by a microscope of some sort, and confocal fluorescence microscopy was the most popular technique: Supplementary file 1 lists the different imaging techniques used in each of the 185 articles. Just over three-quarters of the papers (185/240 = 77%) had original images, and just over half of the figures in the papers (1439/2780 = 52%) contained images. To explore the extent and severity of this problem, we examined 240 original research articles in eight journals: Developmental Biology, Development, Developmental Cell, Journal of Cell Biology, Journal of Neuroscience, Nature Immunology, Journal of Immunology, and Biophysical Journal. In this article we highlight the need for improved reporting of experiments that involve microscopy. To that end, some publishers have established checklists that authors must complete (see, for example, Development, 2020 eLife, 2019 Marcus and the whole Cell team, 2016 NPG, 2020), and there is evidence from some areas that these interventions are having a positive effect ( Macleod and the NPQIP Collaboration Group, 2017 Han et al., 2017 NPG, 2018). As regards incomplete reporting, a number of publishers and funding agencies have signed up to the TOP (Transparency and Openness Promotion) guidelines developed by the Center for Open Science ( Nosek et al., 2015): signatories to these guidelines commit to promote and enforce good practices of attribution, reporting, data archival, and sharing of research tools ( Sullivan et al., 2019). There have been many efforts to address these problems, notably in the area of antibodies and other reagents. Causes for concern have included: the substandard characterization of critical resources and reagents, such as antibodies ( Freedman et al., 2016 Schüchner et al., 2020) and cell lines ( Vaughan et al., 2017) incomplete reporting of experimental methods and reagents ( Lithgow et al., 2017) bias ( Macleod et al., 2015) inadequate statistics ( Benjamin et al., 2018) and outright fraud ( Bauchner et al., 2018). ![]() Such problems are not limited to microscopy, and concerns about a lack of reproducibility in certain areas of biomedical research have been growing over the past decade ( Ioannidis, 2005 Begley and Ellis, 2012 Baker, 2016 Drucker, 2016). However, these experiments are often poorly described, sometimes to the extent that it is not possible to repeat them. The authors work at a major imaging facility ( ) and we are often asked to replicate or expand upon published experiments. The optical microscope has also been joined by a wide range of other imaging instruments, and images and data derived from them are crucial to many studies across the life and biomedical sciences. Over the past three centuries microscopy has evolved from being largely descriptive and qualitative to become a powerful tool that is capable of uncovering new phenomena and exploring molecular mechanisms in a way that is both visual and quantitative ( Trinh and Fraser, 2015). ![]()
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