Ethics in Imaging & Analysis

Any form of scientific data collection and analysis comes with the responsibility to make unbias analysis and complete reporting to allow reproducibility. The aim of this page is to list some generic points of good scientific practice to consider for field of Microscopy and Image Analysis.

  • FAIR: Findable, Available, Indexed & Reproducible
  • The importance of documentation
  • Ethics in Microscopy
  • Ethics in Image Analysis

IMPORTANCE OF DOCUMENTATION:

Based on the alarming, survey of many prominent journals reported by G. Marques, T. and M. Sanders that showed that most microscopy-based experiments are severely under- and mis-reported in the literature.  (https://elifesciences.org/articles/55133), we were triggered to initiate this website. Please consider the points addressed below to best allow reproducibility of your published data.

MICROSCOPY:
    • Nature Structural & Molecular Biology volume 32, page 955 (2025): Reporting light microscopy data in our pages
    • Nature Cell Biology volume 27, page 877 (2025): Light microscopy reporting for reproducibility

    • Boehm et.al., Nature Methods volume 18, pages 1423–1426 (2021) QUAREP-LiMi: a community endeavor to advance quality assessment and reproducibility in light microscopy

  • Heddleston, J.M., Aaron, J.S., Khuon, S., Chew, T.-L. (2021) A guide to accurate reporting in digital image acquisition – can anyone replicate your microscopy data? (https://is.gd/kVisb4)
  • Nature Method Focus Issue of 03 December 2021 featured a series of papers offering guidelines and tools for improving the tracking and reporting of microscopy metadata with an emphasis on reproducibility and data re-use → click
IMAGE ANALYSIS: