Lack of protocols in cell & molecular biology
by George M Church, Senior Editor Image manipulation and selective reporting of images have been recently in the focus of a healthy debate on the issue of scientific data manipulation. Of course, as editors tell us how they detect fakes (“What’s in a picture? The temptation of image manipulation”, Rossner and Yamada, JCB 2004 166:11), there is a danger that authors will be tempted to upgrade their ploys. More importantly, I think that these issues are symptomatic of a much larger problem in Cell & Molecular Biology which is the lack of protocols for getting from raw data to conclusions. Read more
Recent comments on this blog
The role of neutral mutations in the evolution of phenotypes
Editors’ conference agenda
Editors’ conference agenda