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)

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