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On Mon, 30 Jun 2008, Joel Sheffield wrote:

> Search the CONFOCAL archive at
> http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
>
>
>
> One more point.  I may be old fashioned, but I was brought up to
> think that a research project involves a significant number of
> experiments, some of which "work" and others don't.  As the project
> progresses, the ratio of trustworthy to untrustworthy data increases
> until we can become confident that we can make a statement about the
> phenomenon.  This generally happens as we tweak the system to finally
> arrive at more optimal conditions.  Thus, a full data set of the
> experiments might be informative to a historian, but (even)
> embarassing to the investigator.
>


We live in a world in which we have a limited space to demonstrate results.  Most journal articles are there to demonstrate results, not provide comprehensive data sets. Thus, the appropriate illustration is that which best demonstrates the finding.  If you have 1000 trials and of these 700 show a result and 300 show nothing, one is not obligated to provide 1000 images, or even 100 or even 10.  It is more useful to provide an illustration of the positive finding and note the statistics, assuming that the appearance of the negative finding is intuitively clear (i.e. positive shows staining and negative is dark).  If the difference between positive and negative is unclear, it may be useful to provide an image of each, but I don't think that's usually necessry. 
I don't see any need to take up multiple pages of images of negative results just to demonstrate statistics that are more properly described succinctly in the text.

There is simply no way to provide all of the data in most things in a couple of pages.


billo