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. 2020 Aug 11:9:e55133.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.55133.

Imaging methods are vastly underreported in biomedical research

Guillermo Marqués  1 , Thomas Pengo  2 , Mark A Sanders  1
Affiliations

Imaging methods are vastly underreported in biomedical research

Guillermo Marqués et al. Elife. .

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.

Keywords: cell biology; developmental biology; imaging; microscopy; none; reporting standards; reproducibility; science forum.

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Conflict of interest statement

GM, TP, MS No competing interests declared

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