Author: Mike Rossner

Guest post: NIH-funded replication studies are not the answer to the reproducibility crisis in pre-clinical research

Barbara Smaller/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank

President Trump recently issued an executive order calling for improvement in the reproducibility of scientific research and asking federal agencies to propose how they will make that happen. I imagine that the National Institutes of Health’s response will include replication studies, in which NIH would fund attempts to repeat published experiments from the ground up, to see if they generate consistent results.

Both Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya have already proposed such studies with the objective of determining which NIH-funded research findings are reliable. The goals are presumably to boost public trust in science, improve health-policy decision making, and prevent wasting additional funds on research that relies on unreliable findings. 

As a former biomedical researcher, editor, and publisher, and a current consultant about image data integrity, I would argue that conducting systematic replication studies of pre-clinical research is neither an effective nor an efficient strategy to achieve the objective of identifying reliable research. Such studies would be an impractical use of NIH funds, especially in the face of extensive proposed budget cuts.

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What’s in a picture? Two decades of image manipulation awareness and action

via www.CartoonStock.com

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of “What’s in a picture?  The temptation of image manipulation,” in which I described the problem of image manipulation in biomedical research. 

Two decades later, much has changed.  I am reassured by the heightened awareness of this issue and the numerous efforts to address it by various stakeholders in the publication process, but I am disappointed that image manipulation remains such an extensive problem in the biomedical literature. (Note: I use the term “image manipulation” throughout this piece as a generic term to refer to both image manipulation (e.g., copy/paste, erasure, splicing, etc.) and image duplication.)

In 2002, I was the managing editor of The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), and STM journals were transitioning away from paper submissions.  We had just implemented online manuscript submission, and authors often sent figure files in the wrong file format.  One day, I assisted an author by reformatting some figure files.  In one of the Western blot image panels, I noticed sharp lines around some of the bands, indicating they had either been copied and pasted into the image or the intensity of those bands had been selectively altered.  

Mike Rossner

I vividly recall my reaction, which was, “Oh shit, this is going to be a problem.  We’re going to have to do something about this.”  With the blessing of then editor-in-chief, Ira Mellman, I immediately instituted a policy for the journal to examine all figure files of all accepted manuscripts for evidence of manipulation before they could be published.  We began using simple techniques, which I developed along with three of my colleagues at the time, Rob O’Donnell, Erinn Grady, and Laura Smith.  The approach involved visual inspection of each image panel using adjustments of brightness and contrast in Photoshop, to enhance visualization of background elements.  

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