Juan-Carlos Lopez, Chief Editor of Nature Medicine, discusses the question of data integrity of figures in his post on Spoonful of Medicine: The figure police.

Juan-Carlos discusses an editorial in the Journal of Cell Biology, which takes the line that “the progress of science depends on the reliability of the entire published record, and journal editors must do their part to ensure that reliability”, urging editors to “participate in this dialogue with the scientific community, to help devise effective and practical standards that can be applied to the published literature”.

Should scientific journals screen every image in every paper, as the Journal of Cell Biology editorial recommends? Or is a spot-checking system, such as used by the Nature journals, preferable, on the grounds that the vast majority of the papers published are not fraudulent, and that the journal could invest more usefully in other author and publication services? (This last point is particularly critical for small, society-owned journals that have limited resources.) Or is the responsibility that all research work is honest, and that the papers produced accurately reflect the work done, that of the scientific institution and/or the funder?

The Nature journals’ policies on image integrity can be found at our Author and Referees’ website.