Science Forum: Imaging methods are vastly underreported in biomedical research
- University of Minnesota, United States
Abstract
A variety of microscopy techniques are used by researchers in the life and biomedical sciences. As these techniques become more powerful and more complex, it is vital that scientific articles containing images obtained with advanced microscopes include full details about how each image was obtained. To explore the reporting of such details we examined 240 original research articles published in eight journals. We found that the quality of reporting was poor, with some articles containing no information about how images were obtained, and many articles lacking important basic details. Efforts by researchers, funding agencies, journals, equipment manufacturers and staff at shared imaging facilities are required to improve the reporting of experiments that rely on microscopy techniques.
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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
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The authors declare that there was no funding for this work
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© 2020, Marques et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Science Forum: Imaging methods are vastly underreported in biomedical research
eLife 9:e55133.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.55133
