Producing Effective Tables and Figures/Introduction

Your goal in communicating science should always be to make the topic you are discussing as clear and accessible to your audience as possible. Although your writing is a critical element of this, you should not underestimate the importance of producing effective tables and figures.

Some people find it easier to understand and interpret results and/or the relative magnitude of any trends by looking at figures as opposed to reading explanations in text. Similarly, tables should be used to summarize the most important, specific results in a way that makes it easy for anyone to read and interpret these. Even if you provide similar information in words, it can help to include tables and figures as well. This is particularly true when you are communicating uncertainty and because virtually all data analyses are based on probability, there will almost always be an element of uncertainty in the results you present in lab reports or research-based journal articles.

On the other hand, some people struggle to interpret figures (and information contained in tables), which means there are some guidelines you should follow when producing these, to minimize the likelihood of confusing your readers. Remember that you should be producing a table or figure to help show a pattern and/or specific information in a way that is easier to interpret than if it was simply written. With this in mind, you should always try to:

1) Be clear and concise.

Someone without any background in your discipline (and who hasn’t even read any of the accompanying work) should be able to look at the figure or table and at least understand and interpret the pattern it shows (e.g. If you show your history-studying roommate a figure showing a pattern from biology data, they should be able to describe that to you without having read any of your report).

2) Avoid redundancy.

There is no point writing exactly what a figure or table shows in text if you then display exactly the same information in the related figure or table. There is no need to write about every detail in text when that specific detail can be found in accompanying tables and figures (e.g. write ‘As food resources decrease, hare birth rates also decrease (see Figure 1). For each 10% reduction in food resources, hare birth rates decreased by a similar margin (see Table 1 for specific amounts)’.

3) Give clear titles and legends that are concise and easy to read.

Try to describe the patterns shown in the figures or tables in the titles themselves, as this helps people interpret what the data show (e.g. if your figure shows the general pattern that hare birth rates decrease when food resources decrease, use a title like ‘Hare birth rates decrease when food resources decrease,’ rather than ‘The relationship between hare birth rates and food resources,’ which leaves the reader to interpret things (potentially inaccurately).

4) Be consistent.

Make sure you use the same abbreviations throughout, and if you have different treatment groups, make sure they appear in the same order from one table/figure to the next (e.g. don’t label data of hares from Nova Scotia as ‘NS’ in Figure 1, and then as ‘Nova Scotia hares’ in Figure 2).