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arXiv · 2302.07005

Community-developed checklists for publishing images and image analysis

Abstract

Images document scientific discoveries and are prevalent in modern biomedical research. Microscopy imaging in particular is currently undergoing rapid technological advancements. However for scientists wishing to publish the obtained images and image analyses results, there are to date no unified guidelines. Consequently, microscopy images and image data in publications may be unclear or difficult to interpret. Here we present community-developed checklists for preparing light microscopy images and image analysis for publications. These checklists offer authors, readers, and publishers key recommendations for image formatting and annotation, color selection, data availability, and for reporting image analysis workflows. The goal of our guidelines is to increase the clarity and reproducibility of image figures and thereby heighten the quality of microscopy data is in publications.

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Christopher Schmied, Michael Nelson, Sergiy Avilov, Gert-Jan Bakker, Cristina Bertocchi, Johanna Bischof, Ulrike Boehm, Jan Brocher, Mariana Carvalho, Catalin Chiritescu, Jana Christopher, Beth Cimini, Eduardo Conde-Sousa, Michael Ebner, Rupert Ecker, Kevin Eliceiri, Julia Fernandez-Rodriguez, Nathalie Gaudreault, Laurent Gelman, David Grunwald, Tingting Gu, Nadia Halidi, Mathias Hammer, Matthew Hartley, Marie Held, Florian Jug, Varun Kapoor, Ayse Aslihan Koksoy, Judith Lacoste, Sylvia Le Dévédec, Sylvie Le Guyader, Penghuan Liu, Gabriel Martins, Aastha Mathur, Kota Miura, Paula Montero Llopis, Roland Nitschke, Alison North, Adam Parslow, Alex Payne-Dwyer, Laure Plantard, Ali Rizwan, Britta Schroth-Diez, Lucas Schütz, Ryan T. Scott, Arne Seitz, Olaf Selchow, Ved Sharma, Martin Spitaler, Sathya Srinivasan, Caterina Strambio De Castillia, Douglas Taatjes, Christian Tischer, Helena Klara Jambor. 2023-02-14. Community-developed checklists for publishing images and image analysis. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-01987-9

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