Nature
By Sara Reardon
Illustration: The Project Twins
A decade ago, Helena Jambor found herself struggling to understand the figures in the scientific papers she was reading during her postdoc. Jambor was studying how fluorescently labelled messenger RNA arranges itself inside embryos of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and wanted to choose the images that would most clearly convey her findings. But she couldn’t find many helpful guidelines — or even good examples in the literature. “When you start out, you think you’re the one who’s stupid,” she says. “But after ten years in science, you realize, okay, now I’m an expert and I still don’t understand some of these figures.”
Jambor, now a biologist and visualization specialist at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany, realized that image presentation wasn’t just a problem in her own field. In 2021, when she and her colleagues analysed the figures of 580 biology papers in 15 top journals, they found that most contained poorly presented images (H. Jambor et al. PLoS Biol. 19, e3001161; 2021). Many panels lacked labels or scale bars, and annotation features, such as descriptive text and arrows, were often missing from the imaged objects. “I just think it’s sad if someone spends four years researching an amazing issue and publishes a paper and then has a figure that is not fully understandable,” she says. “It will inevitably reduce the readership.”
Whereas scientists receive extensive training on how to collect data, less work goes into teaching them how to showcase the information in publications, presentations and grant applications.