Editorial pubs.acs.org/cm
Figure Size: Please Be Kind to Your Reader Cramming may work for studying, but not for scientific papers A potential reader likes the title of your paper, the table of contents image is clear and compelling, and this person, intrigued, downloads your paper as either a PDF or an html document onto their computer or smartphone. They may print a copy to take home. You, the authors of this paper, have succeeded in crafting the packaging of the scientific story into which countless hours, days, and years of effort have been distilled and honed. The first thing that many readers then do is skim the figures to get a sense of what experiments you did, and what you learned from them. The figures are thus the next hurdle that you, the authors, need to help your reader overcome for them to grapple with the central themes, the meat, of your paper. If your figures are crammed into a single column, and/or if they appear jumbled and are near impossible to see, you have made that hurdle for your reader that much higher, and the chances of you losing the patience of the reader at this early stage increase dramatically. The figures contain your datawithout data, you do not have a paperand thus it is absolutely critical that you compose your figures and hence present your data with the goal of absolute clarity and ease of understanding. In 2014, the editors of 4 ACS journals composed a virtual issue of 20 papers, entitled “Mastering the Art of Scientific Publication”.1,2 Several of the papers discuss the presentation and layout of figures and table of contents images, and are an excellent reference for tips on how to design figures. One problem that we frequently see, however, is the cramming of tiny spectra, atomic force and electron micrographs, plots, and schemes into very small areas.
Figure 2. Treat your readers gently. The author hamming for the camera, pretending to use old-fashioned and USB optical microscopes to view tiny figures. Please make your figures large enough to present your data clearlybe kind to your reader.
In this day and age, far more papers are viewed on screens, meaning that images can be blown up dramatically, but nothing inconveniences your reader more than having to interrupt their reading to expand an image just to read the axes on a plot, for instance, only to have lost track of where they were. By not making your figure large enough on the page, the hurdles mentioned earlier become high, causing you to risk losing the reader’s attention. Very often we see figures like that shown in Figure 1, in which so much of the scientific story is crammed into one figure. Artists think carefully about how the eye of the viewer is directed throughout a painting or photograph, but in Figure 1, the reader’s eyes cannot help but bounce around between the images, without direction, even with the alphabetic captions (a), (b), and (c). The clutter is highly distracting, the text an eye-squinting miniscule font, and the microscopy images, which need to be examined carefully and on large scale for subtle nuances, are frustratingly minute (Figure 2). A reader may wonder what the authors are trying to hide by reproducing their images in a corner of a larger figure.
Figure 1. Example of a cluttered and overly complex figure. Too much disparate data confuses the message you want to emphasize to your reader. The SEM and AFM micrographs are near impossible to see, and the text in the figures is small and hard to read. Break the data into two or more separate figures. Images reproduced with permission from ref 3. Copyright 2016 American Chemical Society. © 2017 American Chemical Society
Published: October 10, 2017 8021
DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.7b04002 Chem. Mater. 2017, 29, 8021−8022
Chemistry of Materials
Editorial
Our advice to authors is the following: (i) Break your data into bite sized pieces (your figures). Think about what you want the reader to learn from each figure−too much information crammed into a figure will obscure your message. (ii) Start with a clear and uncluttered scheme, situated toward the beginning of your paper, that outlines your idea, your approach, and/or your hypothesis. Addition of data to your scheme may confuse your reader, but a tantalizing representative image may be helpful. (iii) If you are cramming your data into a figure to force your paper to adhere to the size restrictions of a communication, please reconsider the format of your paper. An article is much better than a communication with unreadable figures, and will most likely be more successful with respect to peer review. Your reviewers are readers too. (iv) Chemistry of Materials does not have page restrictions. Take advantage of the “unlimited” space to best express your data to your readers. (v) Use your Supporting Information to add large-scale images (microscopy images in particular) to enable your reader to have a close look. Please skim recent issues of Chemistry of Materials to get a sense of figure layout. We work with authors to improve the presentation of their figures, as we want our authors to be as proud of their published papers as we are. We know that we are not perfect, and that there is always room for improvement, but we do try to make suggestions to authors to help with clarity of expression, both verbal and visual. As always, we look forward to hearing from you.
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Jillian M. Buriak, Editor-in-Chief AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
Jillian M. Buriak: 0000-0002-9567-4328 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) http://pubs.acs.org/page/vi/art_of_scientific_publication.html. (2) Kamat, P. V.; Buriak, J. M.; Schatz, G. C.; Weiss, P. S. Mastering the Art of Scientific Publication. J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2014, 5, 3519− 3521. (3) Liu, F.; Hauger, T. C.; Olsen, B. C.; Luber, E. J.; Buriak, J. M. Polymers, Plasmons & Patterns − Mechanism of Plasmon-induced Hydrosilylation on Silicon. Chem. Mater. 2016, 28, 9158−9168.
8022
DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.7b04002 Chem. Mater. 2017, 29, 8021−8022
