Digital Images Are Data: And Should Be Treated as Such

The scienti fi c community has become very concerned about inappropriate image manipulation. In journals that check fi gures after acceptance, 20–25 % of the papers contained at least one fi gure that did not comply with the journal’s instructions to authors. The scienti fi c press continues to report a small, but steady stream of cases of fraudulent image manipulation. Inappropriate image manipulation taints the scienti fi c record, damages trust within science, and degrades science’s reputation with the general public. Scientists can learn from historians and photojournalists, who have provided a number of examples of attempts to alter or misrepresent the historical record. Scientists must remember that digital images are numerically sampled data that represent the state of a speci fi c sample when examined with a speci fi c instrument. These data should be carefully managed. Changes made to the original data need to be tracked like the protocols used for other experimental procedures. To avoid pitfalls, unexpected artifacts, and unintentional misrep-resentation of the image data, a number of image processing guidelines are offered