Career Development: Include illustrations in your manuscripts

As a career development tool it is very useful to develop skills in illustration and graphic design. Several journal editors have told me that illustrations in a paper, especially those that depict a key concept, theory or causal path way, can improve the citation rate of the paper.  I think this will be especially true now that PubMed Central has the ability to search for illustrations and includes illustrations in search results.

Another advantage of providing illustrations is that their availability online often co-opts others into describing the concept in question in your terms.  Researchers often download the images from PubMed Central and use them in their classes, lectures and seminars and then explain the concepts using the language in the figure caption.

Here is an illustration of mine that I have seen used in presentations.

(Mutation Research, 2006)

More often than not, the use of the illustration prompts the speaker into describing the concept in the terms, language and perspective used in the original paper, and as a bonus they also almost always reference the original work.  In a very real way an illustration can define how an idea is talked about and the starting point from which an idea evolves.  As such, it serves as a tool for propagating the ideas in the original paper and for generating citations for the work.

Another illustration of mine often used in seminars.

While working on my Doctorate I took or sat-in on several undergrad computer graphics and graphic design classes which taught me some very useful skills.

My graphics programs of choice are:

Gimp – for photo editing and composting multiple images together (Freeware).

RasMol – for creating images of molecules and proteins (Freeware).

Maya – for creating original 3D and 2D computer generated imagery.

Poser – for creating images of human figures.

PowerPoint – has become a go-to tool for me, it have some strong illustration tools including the ability to create lines, curves and primitives with control points (more on this in another post). It is also good for layout and combining vector and raster graphical elements into a single image.

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