Well at the risk of being attacked for my spelling and typos (!!), my stupidity, my previous and many publications omissions, and probably even unrelated sins (I plead guilty now), I will weigh in on the bad flow data......so .... The only real solution to this issue is education of staff, students and faculty. If we teach our students the right thing, we go a long way to solving the problem. Legislation, rules, and the like, will only serve to make more work for us all... so the responsibility is squarely upon the shoulders of each and every PI, lab director and professor out there... First, I will say that as editor of Current Protocols in Cytometry, I made a decision 5 years ago that I would NOT accept or publish any flow figure which had axes labeled "FL1", "FL2", etc...at the risk of being beaten up, I will note that a great number of you are guilty of trying to publish figures with almost totally meaningless axis labels...... we almost succeeded .....in about 1500 pages I think we found 2 that got through and they are being removed as we speak.....Cytometry used to accept this all the time - a figure labeled with an axes which say Axis 1 Vs Axes 2 (read FL1 Vs FL2 here) would even be laughed at by editors of Science, but we published these frequently in our own journal....I think we are getting better now, but we have to be careful So Rule # 1: Label the axes in a meaningful way Second, why do we publish half of the plots and histograms we publish? A good number of them are probably published because we have used them for subjective evaluation purposes and not quantitative evaluation (I know I have done the same....) so perhaps if we designed our experiments better, we would be able to come up with quantitative measures that would give us number of molecules per cell (or something akin to that) rather than a picture that looks more messy on one side than the other. So Rule #2: How about being more quantitative? Third, the real issue to me is the publication of relatively bad looking histograms or dot plots from which very significant decisions are made. Thus we constantly see "a representative histogram" and then some numbers perhaps to prove a point (OK I have done this too...) So Rule #3: Representative histograms (plots) may not be so useful after all... Finally, the issue of post-review. My dad used to say it was no good closing the gate after the horse got out. I never did know what he meant as a kid since we never owned a horse. Bottom line is, post-reviewing our own papers would be a very difficult thing to implement....post-reviewing other Journals papers might be a little bit arrogant.....I just can't imagine a website that is essentially contributed to by flow jocks (and Jills) commenting on the nasty quality of data in Science and Nature, Cell etc etc.... Not sure that anyone that every puts their name to such a list will ever manage to get a paper published in such a journal again...... So Rule #4: Let's not get into the business of publically post- reviewing articles published in other journals... And really, really finally, I have one more rule.... So Rule #5: lets not make up a list of rules....... May all your plots be exorcised with care...... Paul Robinson J.Paul Robinson, PhD PH:(765)4940757 Professor of Immunopharmacology Professor of Biomedical Engineering Purdue University FAX:(765)4940517 EMAIL:jpr@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu WEB: http://www.cyto.purdue.edu
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