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Published online 9 October 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.991
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Science journals crack down on image manipulation
US figures show that incidents have jumped in the past two years.
More science journals are taking action to tackle the growing problem of falsified and manipulated images in papers submitted to them for publication.
At a meeting on plagiarism in London last week, Virginia Barbour, chief editor of PLoS Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which is headquartered in San Francisco, California, said that the problem of image manipulation has "crept up" on journal editors since the advent of software such as Photoshop.
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My personal experience says Research supervisors/guide also need to be trained to detect manipulated pictures sometime being submited in thesis by students.
it is a very importanting issue. The design and manipulation software has evolved so quickly and today every student or scientist can afford a software license and learn to use the features.
Seems to me that should be ruled the limits of 'manipulation', so in a situation could be neutral to change the light and contrast in a picture, but in other situation this could be called manipulation, in the worst sense of the word.
As a graduate student in an image-heavy field, I can also say that students need guidance on the difference between "adjusting the contrast" and falsifying the image. There is a fine line sometimes, and it would be terribly easy for a student to cross unwittingly, especially if the supervisor uses Photoshop a lot and pressures the student for perfect data. The student may not see the difference between what the supervisor does and what s/he attempts to do. Standardized, freely available study materials for beginners in a given field of study, with examples illustrating "this is OK to adjust, that is not", would be really helpful.
For the record, some journals have been screening all images in all provisionally accepted manuscripts for some time. In fact, Mike Rossner, former Managing Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, pioneered the standards in use by much of the STM publishing community today (including the PLoS journals).
At the JCB, we have screened all images of all editorially accepted papers since 2002. Over that time, we have consistently seen manipulations that affected the interpretation of the data in ~1% of accepted manuscripts. We have revoked the acceptance of those manuscripts. We find manipulations that violate our guidelines but do not affect the interpretatoin of the data in over 25% of accepted manuscripts. In those cases, the authors have to remake the figure(s) in question with a more accurate representationof the original data.
Emma Hill, Executive Editor
The Journal of Cell Biology
Its necessary a cross check for anything at any time because this way we can improve the quality and accuracy and authentication of the results.Manipulation should never question the quality of work and should not be a mislead one.
>>"Everything is submitted electronically, which makes manipulating images much easier to do,"<<
Is that the case? Doesn't it in fact make detection of manipulation easier than if a printout of a manipulated image were submitted?
(And what happened to the ć at the end of my name?)
Test: ć
Test passed.
Image manipulation is not a bad thing if it clarifies a method or result. Scientists normalize, bootstrap, extrapolate, remove outliers, and adjust graph axes all the time to make a statistically significant effect clearer to a reader. As long as there is no falsification, adjusting an image to better represent the data already there should be permissible (given, of course, an in-text explanation of the manipulations).
There is no way to prevent this in present format. As long as software’s are there the image can be manipulated. Personal honesty is of the main importance. The journals can publish a complimentary data online, and in that section they can keep the original data as it is. Then there will be a chance to authors to show, what was the real picture when it has been taken or how the picture was changed to fulfill the requirement. At the same time it will reach to thousand hands in form of soft copy. Any one can check them if manipulated and escaped from journal. This will increase the transparency.
Rajiv Lochan Gaur