captions – Brushing Up Science

Captioning a scientific figure is like commenting code

Comments within code are harmless, right? They don’t affect run-time, so you might as well use them whenever there’s any doubt something is unclear.

I hope you aren’t nodding your head, because a liberal use of comments is the wrong approach. Not all types of code comments are evil, but many are rightfully despised by programmers as (i) band-aid solutions to bad code, (ii) redundant, or even (iii) worse than no comment at all.

The same is true for scientific figures and their captions. In fact, many of the rules discussed in the post Best Practices for Writing Code Comments remain valid when we replace comments and code with captions and figures, respectively.

The formatting of Nature, Cell, and Science papers improves their readability

My favourite aspect of a Nature paper is the figure captions. Not the paper’s innovative science. Not the paper’s succinct length. The figure captions. Why? Because the journal’s simple act of bolding the first sentence of a figure caption can force authors to clarify the purpose of the figure. This is one of several seemingly minor formatting issues that ultimately improves a paper’s readibility.