What's in a picture? The temptation of image manipulation

It’s all so easy with Photoshop 1 . In the days before imaging software became so widely available, making adjustments to image data in the darkroom required considerable effort and/or expertise. It is now very simple, and thus tempting, to adjust or modify digital image files. Many such manipulations, however, constitute inappropriate changes to your original data, and making such changes can be classified as scientific misconduct. Skilled editorial staff can spot such manipulations using features in the imaging software, so manipulation is also a risky proposition. Good science requires reliable data. Consequently, to protect the integrity of research, the scientific community takes strong action against perceived scientific misconduct. In the current definition provided by the U.S. government: “Research misconduct is defined as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.” For example, showing a figure in which part of the image was either selectively altered or reconstructed to show something that did not exist originally (for example, adding or modifying a band in a polyacrylamide gel image) can represent falsification or fabrication. Being accused of misconduct initiates a painful process that can disrupt one’s research and career. To avoid such a situation, it is important to understand where the ethical lines are drawn between acceptable and unacceptable image adjustment. Here we present some general guidelines for the proper handling of digital image data and provide some specific examples to illustrate pitfalls and inappropriate practices. There are different degrees of severity of a manipulation, depending on whether the alteration deliberately changes the interpretation of the data. That is, creating a result is worse than making weak data look better. Nevertheless, any manipulation that violates these guidelines is a misrepresentation of the original data and is a form of misconduct. All of the examples we will show here have been created by us using Photoshop; although they may appear bizarre, it is remarkable that they are actually based on real cases of digital manipulation discovered by a careful examination of digital images in a sample of papers submitted (or even accepted) for publication in a journal.