A Brief Guide to Designing Effective Figures for the Scientific Paper

Rolandi, Marco; Cheng, Karen G.; Pérez-Kriz, Sarah

doi:10.1002/adma.201102518

Cited by 27 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…In this study, scientists and engineers were shown a series of figures that were redesigned following basic visual design principles 3 . An example of a redesigned figure is shown 4 .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Graphic design for scientists

Cheng

Rolandi

2015

Nature Nanotech

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“…In this study, scientists and engineers were shown a series of figures that were redesigned following basic visual design principles 3 . An example of a redesigned figure is shown 4 .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Graphic design for scientists

Cheng

Rolandi

2015

Nature Nanotech

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“…Figures are key components in scientific papers as they communicate results efficiently (Cleveland, 1984), facilitate the assessment of relevancy (Sandusky et al, 2007), and help understanding (Rolandi et al, 2011). Mack (2014, p. 4) said: "When presenting results, a good graph is like a good scientific theory -once you see it, everything just makes sense."…”

Section: Figures In Scientific Publicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Publishing Reproducible Geoscientific Papers: Status quo, benefits, and opportunities

Konkol¹

2019

Preprint

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Open reproducible research (ORR) is the practice of publishing the source code andthe datasets that are needed to produce the computational results reported in a paper.Since geoscientific articles often include geostatistical analyses and spatiotemporaldata, reproducibility should be a cornerstone of the computational geosciences butis rarely realized. In addition, the current way of publishing scientific outcomes, i.e.as static PDFs, does not adequately report on computational aspects. Thus, readerscannot fully understand how the authors came to the conclusions and how robustthese are to changes in the analysis. Consequently, it is difficult for reviewers tofollow the analysis steps, and for other researchers to reuse existing materials. Thisdissertation has two overarching goals to tackle these issues: First, it aims at assistingauthors in adhering to ORR principles to ensure high scientific standards. The secondgoal is to reap the benefits that come with papers supplemented by code and data. Toachieve these objectives, this thesis reports on five complementary studies to collectand analyze qualitative (i.e. through interviews and a focus group) and quantitativedata (i.e. through surveys and reproducibility studies). Based on these studies, thiswork provides four key contributions: First, it identifies obstacles that preventedgeoscientists from publishing ORR. To overcome these barriers, this dissertationsuggests concrete and directly applicable strategies. One of these strategies is theexecutable research compendium (ERC) which encapsulates the paper, code, data,and the entire software environment needed to produce the computational results.Based on that, this work presents the design and implementation of an ERC-basedworkflow. It allows authors to convey their computational methods and results byalso providing interactive access to code and data, and readers to deeply investigatethe computational analysis while reading the actual article, e.g. by changing theparameters of the analysis. Finally, this work describes the concept of a binding; abinding connects those code lines and data subsets that produce a specific result, e.g.a figure or number. By also considering user interface widgets (e.g. a slider), thisapproach allows readers to interactively manipulate the parameters of the analysisto see how these changes affect the result. To conclude, the contributions include (i)a set of obstacles which prevent geoscientists from publishing ORR, (ii) conceptsand tools to overcome the identified barriers, (iii) incentives and opportunities thatcome with attached code and data, and (iv) solutions to realize the incentives whicheventually result in a higher number of open and reproducible research.

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“…Figures are key components in scientific papers as they communicate results efficiently (Cleveland, 1984), facilitate the assessment of relevancy (Sandusky, Tenopir, & Casado, 2007), and help understanding (Rolandi, Cheng, & Pérez-Kriz, 2011). Mack (2014) said: "When presenting results, a good graph is like a good scientific theoryonce you see it, everything just makes sense."…”

Section: Figures In Scientific Publicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%