When the Image Is the Evidence, Verify It!

When a figure carries the proof and the unaided eye cannot confirm it, verifying it is a control you run before publication, not a correction you make after. In much of science, the figure carries the scientific argument. Whether an effect is real, whether a material behaved as designed, whether a treatment did what a paper says it did, the answer often rests on what a reader can see in a figure rather than on what a sentence asserts. A micrograph, a gel, a blot, a scan, a data plot: across fields as different as cell biology, materials science, and clinical research, the image is frequently the evidence itself. And when the proof lives in a figure, the figure must be one we can trust.