Science Forum: Imaging methods are vastly underreported in biomedical research

  1. Guillermo Marques  Is a corresponding author
  2. Thomas Pengo
  3. Mark A Sanders
  1. 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.

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. 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.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-1478-1955
  2. Thomas Pengo

    University of Minnesota Informatics Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-9632-918X
  3. 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.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7550-5255

Funding

The authors declare that there was no funding for this work

Reviewing Editor

  1. Peter Rodgers, eLife, United Kingdom

Publication history

  1. Received: January 14, 2020
  2. Accepted: August 10, 2020
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: August 11, 2020 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: August 18, 2020 (version 2)

Copyright

© 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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  1. Guillermo Marques
  2. Thomas Pengo
  3. 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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