Science Forum: Imaging methods are vastly underreported in biomedical research

University of Minnesota, United States

Aug 11, 2020

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Guillermo Marques

Thomas Pengo

Mark A Sanders

(2020)
Science Forum: Imaging methods are vastly underreported in biomedical research

eLife 9:e55133.

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.55133
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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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Guillermo Marques

University Imaging Centers and Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, United States

For correspondence
marques@umn.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1478-1955
Thomas Pengo

University of Minnesota Informatics Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9632-918X
Mark A Sanders

University Imaging Centers and Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7550-5255

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The authors declare that there was no funding for this work

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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.