How to Keep Us from Making Fun of Your Paper

Let's talk a little shop here.

Dustin and I, and the rest of your Evolving Scientist Blog Squad, often take great pride in highlighting flubs and poor design in research papers. Not many people (including graduate students) realize how many hats a modern scientist must wear beyond performing experiments: a businessperson in ascertaining funding, a writer in preparing manuscripts, a graphic designer in preparing figures for your papers and PowerPoint-based talks, politician with your institute, teacher with classes and those training in your lab, and other stuff I'm sure I've never even thought about.

There's a new paper out today that focuses on basic design of figures that anyone who is obligated to publish their research should cop: "A Brief Guide to Designing Effective Figures for the Scientific Paper"

The image above comes from the paper, Panel A shows a god-awful figure reminiscent of some science blog web-design elements I encountered when improving the look of the site. The figure is then made more useful and appealing as you go to Panel B and C.

The digital age is changing the way science is presented, be it the image editing power of Photoshop, online publishing of journals, and the noble undertaking of popular-science blogging by sexually adept young folk such as us. If you're reading this, you're obviously already hip to keen design via the smooth code styling under the hood here at the Evolving Scientist. Science is often publicly funded, therefore the findings resulting from such funding shouldn't be muddled by a 1990s Angelfire website's design template.

So please: no more Comic Sans in your figures, PowerPoints, or websites.