A comparative study on the use of microscopy in pharmacology and cell biology research

Microscopy is the main technique to visualize and study the structure and function of cells. The impact of optical and electron microscopy techniques is enormous in all fields of biomedical research. It is possible that different research areas rely on microscopy in diverse ways. Here, we analyzed comparatively the use of microscopy in pharmacology and cell biology, among other biomedical sciences fields. We collected data from articles published in several major journals in these fields. We analyzed the frequency of use of different optical and electron microscopy techniques: bright field, phase contrast, differential interference contrast, polarization, conventional fluorescence, confocal, live cell imaging, super resolution, transmission and scanning electron microscopy, and cryoelectron microscopy. Our analysis showed that the use of microscopy has a distinctive pattern in each research area, and that nearly half of the articles from pharmacology journals did not use any microscopy method, compared to the use of microscopy in almost all the articles from cell biology journals. The most frequent microscopy methods in all the journals in all areas were bright field and fluorescence (conventional and confocal). Again, the pattern of use was different: while the most used microscopy methods in pharmacology were bright field and conventional fluorescence, in cell biology the most used methods were conventional and confocal fluorescence, and live cell imaging. We observed that the combination of different microscopy techniques was more frequent in cell biology, with up to 6 methods in the same article. To correlate the use of microscopy with the research theme of each article, we analyzed the proportion of microscopy figures with the use of cell culture. We analyzed comparatively the vocabulary of each biomedical sciences field, by the identification of the most frequent words in the articles. The collection of data described here shows a vast difference in the use of microscopy among different fields of biomedical sciences. The data presented here could be valuable in other scientific and educational contexts.