With examples of his work on monitoring air pollution in Los Angeles and Mexico City, he sought to demonstrate that a carefully crafted and readable visualization will do just that. For McRae's purposes, the risk of possible misinterpretation of visualizations was secondary to the benefits of the audience understanding the science. More recently, concern has grown in the visualization community and the science media over the use of scientific imagery, its interpretation, and the relation of the data to its interpretation. Computer manipulation of images, in the general sense, has been a subject of interest in the popular press. Appearance is important to the interpretation of a scientific image, but not solely.
Science is presented as a story or a metaphor.
In light of this, scientific imagery must be evaluated as information, as well as design, demanding a broader view of both. When they are removed from the scientific research, poorly labeled, or shown in a sequential video without context, scientific images tell little about the procedures that generated them. Intentionally or unintentionally, the use and reuse of such images may mislead viewers. Texts in scientific journals are formally peer reviewed, but scientific imagery is not. Cox emphasized that peer review may be the necessary step in improving the credibility of scientific visualization as a vehicle for insight into data.