Images and imagination: the role of figures in plant cell and molecular biology publications

Abstract

One of the current mantras in research publishing is that science papers should ‘‘tell a story.’’ I have been known to utter this phrase to my own trainees in the form of a strong suggestion. Current wisdom states that telling a cogent story through a scientific publication is an important vehicle to render research findings understandable—not only to reviewers and primary readers of the papers, i.e., other scientists, but also to science writers and the public. After all, a paper with a novel finding that tells a good story can potentially get published in a journal with a high impact factor and will be cited at high frequency. And if these conventional research metrics are not enough to spur on the storytelling, we are now reminded of ‘‘altmetrics’’ (see http://altmetrics.org/manifesto) such as the number of posts on blogs, Facebook and popular media articles. Of course, one problem about telling a story is that stories, by their nature, are often fictional. Research journal articles fall into the genre of non-fiction. The temptation to embellish or ‘‘tell a tall tale,’’ ever-present in the quest of storytelling, cannot be tolerated in science papers. ‘‘A picture is worth a thousand words’’ goes the old saying. Historically, illustrations, graphs, micrographs and other types of figures in papers were used to show key data that would help the reader to understand the most important findings in a study. The same is true today, but in the digital age, molecular data in gels, blots and photographic images are easily manipulated with a few mouse swipes and keystrokes. In addition, raw data images included in older techniques, such as northern blot analysis has been replaced by real-time RT-PCR summary data. Papers published in Plant Cell Reports are typically awash with digital data and images, which should give us pause for a reality check. Back in the old analog days of Kodachrome and Polaroids, what you saw was truth—the raw data. The common adage, ‘‘typical results are shown’’ was usually interpreted as ‘‘best results are shown,’’ but at least the reader could assume that the results were real, and that they were, to some degree, represented by the image. Sadly, programs such as Photoshop render this assumption obsolete. Readers, reviewers and editors should be vigilant to assess if ‘‘typical results’’ are actual results at all. Fanelli’s (2009) meta-analysis of research misconduct surveys found that 1.97 % of scientists admitted to falsification or fabrication. More shocking is that scientists admitted that they had observed that 14.12 % of their colleagues had falsified research (Fanelli 2009). Estimates range as high as 20 % of cell biology papers containing a questionable figure (Pearson 2005). Rossner and Yamada (2004) have succinctly described guidelines about permissible image manipulation. There is no need to recapitulate the details of their discussion here—I encourage all scientists to read their paper. What is important as an overriding research integrity issue is that the images shown on the pages of Plant Cell Reports and other journals should reflect the true nature of the data and the experiments performed. For example, if a gel contained 12 lanes, then the best practice is to show the entire gel and only the gel in the panel—the unit of the study should be made clear to the reader. Therefore, images of separate gels should not be spliced together, and if lanes within a gel are removed in an image, it is best practice to state the image was manipulated. A photographic image of plant cells or tissues should be honestly representative. A key guideline is that Communicated by G. Hahne.