Quality really matters: the need to improve specimen quality in biomedical research

Contemporary pathological and molecular analysis depends on high quality human biospecimens. Poor biospecimen quality may compromise such analyses and the resultant inaccurate data published in scientific papers may be contribute to low reproducibility in the biomedical literature and adversely impact clinical translation. Editors of research journals play a key role in improving sample quality in biomedical by implementing established guidelines. The Editors of Histopathology and The Journal of Pathology will now require that researchers follow the BRISQ guidelines (Biospecimen Reporting for Improved Study Quality) in their papers and hope that this will be a model adopted by other journals in this domain. Copyright © 2012 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.