Show the data, don't conceal them

This short editorial is the first of a planned series to guide the handling of data from laboratory experiments. We hope that authors (and editors) may find this helpful in writing and assessing future journal articles. It’s clear that data handling in science needs to be improved, if only from the number of attempts that have been made to rectify the problem. Books, articles and websites give copious words of advice, too numerous to cite. Many are indeed helpful, but others are often too dense and discouraging for the non-specialist. Often the advice is ‘too general in nature, too limited in scope, and too specialized in vocabulary to be useful to most authors and editors’ (Lang & Secic, 2010). On one occasion the American Physiological Society gave specific advice (Curran-Everett & Benos, 2004). When the guidelines were followed up, the results were found to be mixed, with some praise but also criticism and controversy, with little overall effect on the quality of publication (Curran-Everett & Benos, 2007). In general, encouraged by the slow but substantial change that has occurred in medical journals, there seems to be a mood to improve, although changes in basic science journals have been slow, if they have occurred at all. Comparison of basic science reports with clinical studies is not flattering (Watters & Goodman, 1999). We are well aware that advice alone has been ineffective. We could easily list a comprehensive set of guidelines, which would probably suffer a fate similar to those