5 ms·

- "A key limitation of the study is its reliance on authors themselves revealing what instruments they used in figure captions and not cropping out relevant ima

- "A key limitation of the study is its reliance on authors themselves revealing what instruments they used in figure captions and not cropping out relevant image metadata, Richardson said. " 2,400 out of "more than 1 million" is a much smaller fraction than 2,400 out of 8,515. Could there be an explanation along the lines of "neglecting to strip SEM instrument captions strongly correlates with quality issues elsewhere"? Is it a social norm to remove these metadata captions from images before publishing them in journals? I'd suspect something like that, since >99% of these >1 million papers did just that.

toxik 2y ago
A lot of tools strip metadata by accident or intent, I have come to find out. Uploading to Slack, for example, strips ITXT from PNG files.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Intent, usually. People tend not to realize they can reveal their GPS location down to the centimeter when uploading a candid phone shot to Facebook, so the major services tend to strip off anything that's not the image itself. (Less bandwidth, as a bonus.)
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    Nowadays AI tools can locate most images, especially if taken outdoors or in public buildings, even without metadata.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  It’s standard practice to strip out metadata if the photo will be seen by other people.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mbreese 2y ago
  They aren’t talking about metadata records from a photograph. I believe they are referring to information that’s included in the image itself as a banner overlay. In the link, it’s the box at the bottom of the image with the date, scale, settings, etc. Each manufacturer likely has their own information they include, thus making it obvious which instrument was used. The name of the manufacturer is also included on the image. One reason why metadata like this is included in a medical/research image itself is so that it can’t be stripped unless the image is obviously cropped.
mbreese 2y ago
The title of the post here says “thousands” and the original preprint says “widespread”. 2400/8515 is a pretty significant fraction. My guess is that the metadata was stripped out of images in the publishing workflow. You don’t necessarily need that metadata banner to interpret the image, and if you remove it, you could make the image physically bigger (in print). But, nowadays, journals won’t accept the original images without the banner intact. The journal may remove it in preprocessing, but the authors still have to provide the full image. Thus, the lack of removal of the metadata is probably also an indication of minimal editorial effort. Cropping the images takes time and it reformats papers. Getting a paper “camera ready” (which is a misnomer today), takes time and effort (which means money). If the banners aren’t stripped, it was probably a lower quality journal. I suspect that out of the 900,000+ other papers (that they couldn’t analyze), there is still some rate of misidentification of the instrument (even by mistake), but no where near 28% (2400/8515).

toxik 2y ago

A lot of tools strip metadata by accident or intent, I have come to find out. Uploading to Slack, for example, strips ITXT from PNG files.

ceejayoz 2y ago
Intent, usually. People tend not to realize they can reveal their GPS location down to the centimeter when uploading a candid phone shot to Facebook, so the major services tend to strip off anything that's not the image itself. (Less bandwidth, as a bonus.)
- _yb2s 2y ago
  Nowadays AI tools can locate most images, especially if taken outdoors or in public buildings, even without metadata.
SkyPuncher 2y ago
It’s standard practice to strip out metadata if the photo will be seen by other people.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mbreese 2y ago
They aren’t talking about metadata records from a photograph. I believe they are referring to information that’s included in the image itself as a banner overlay. In the link, it’s the box at the bottom of the image with the date, scale, settings, etc. Each manufacturer likely has their own information they include, thus making it obvious which instrument was used. The name of the manufacturer is also included on the image. One reason why metadata like this is included in a medical/research image itself is so that it can’t be stripped unless the image is obviously cropped.

mbreese 2y ago

The title of the post here says “thousands” and the original preprint says “widespread”. 2400/8515 is a pretty significant fraction. My guess is that the metadata was stripped out of images in the publishing workflow. You don’t necessarily need that metadata banner to interpret the image, and if you remove it, you could make the image physically bigger (in print). But, nowadays, journals won’t accept the original images without the banner intact. The journal may remove it in preprocessing, but the authors still have to provide the full image. Thus, the lack of removal of the metadata is probably also an indication of minimal editorial effort. Cropping the images takes time and it reformats papers. Getting a paper “camera ready” (which is a misnomer today), takes time and effort (which means money). If the banners aren’t stripped, it was probably a lower quality journal. I suspect that out of the 900,000+ other papers (that they couldn’t analyze), there is still some rate of misidentification of the instrument (even by mistake), but no where near 28% (2400/8515).