Long bio pt 2

Talking Points for Figures

1. You need 3 or more figures. The first figure is easy! Each figure should be about a particular aspect of your review. Think of them as different “home bases” that support key parts of the review. Figure 1 supports your description of normal development in Drosophila during the Introduction, and you need to cite that one in the Introduction (although you can cite it again later). Figure 2 could describe expression and function of your gene in Drosophila. Figure 3 could support information about your gene in other animals like humans. Something like that. It is your choice what you do with Figure 2 and Figure 3, and you can have more than 3 figures.

2. Because Figure 1 supports your description of normal development, it needs to be mentioned in the Introduction of your paper during the early steps of describing embryonic development. Don’t tack the citation of the figure at the end of the description. You can cite other figures in the Intro as well, since you are mentioning things like expression and function of your gene, and the effect of homologs in other species. If you think it is needed, of course you can ‘go back’ to the Intro and add citations to Figures 2 and 3 in the Intro. They will be cited again in the body, of course.

Let’s use Figure 1 as an example of how to bring figures into your paper.

3. In Moodle you will find the article Atlas of Drosophila Development . A figure in that article shows a figure for normal Drosophila embryonic development, and a modified form of that figure is provided for you next to the article in Moodle. This figure is from a person named Hartenstein, so its called the Hartenstein figure. Download both the article and the figure. You will need to read the caption for this figure to understand what goes into your caption.

4. In your Introduction, you should cite the figure as Figure 1, and it should be fairly early in the description on development. There are different formats. The formats are:

….xxxxxxxxxx, as shown in Fig. 1, xxxxxxxxxxx ….. – OR--

….xxxxxxxxxx, as shown in Figure 1, xxxxxxxxxxx …..– OR--

……xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Fig. 1.). Xxxxxxxxxxxx …..– OR--

……xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Figure 1). Xxxxxxxxxxx …..

Choose a format, and stick with it for other figure citations.

5. Put that Hartenstein figure into a page in MS word (likely). There are different ways to do that, but one is to simply open the file in PowerPoint and drag and drop it into an MS word page. I’ve done this below, but made it very small so to save space here. Your figure needs to be a lot bigger.

Figure 1. etc. etc. ///////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////.

Next you will want to put in the figure caption. Likely it’s a text box. But I don’t want a solid outline around this text box. So make that disappear, or make it a white outline w/o a drop shadow.

The format for the caption that I want is:

Figure 1. Title line. Orientation. Briefly describe development and labels. Then at the end of the caption have this: Image modified from: Atlas of Drosophila Development (Hartenstein, 1993).

You can look at other papers and their captions for more examples of this sort of thing.

>> For this draft, the caption should be triple -spaced (!), which can complicate things right now. So for this draft it may be best to put captions on the next page, following the actual figure. That will be changed later in the final version of the paper.

>The figure and caption can be in ‘vertical’ format, as shown, or in ‘landscape’ format. Again, its’ your choice.

6. Where should this figure go? Of course one might expect to see figures and their captions to be embedded in the paper somewhere, near where the figure is cited. That is true for a published manuscript (and for papers in some sections of the Capstone course). But in manuscripts submitted for publication the figures and captions go to the end of the manuscript, before or after the Citations section. So for this draft, your figures and captions are simply handed in as a separate document, like other installments you’ve been doing For the final version of the paper, figures and captions are put near the end of the paper

7. Among your references at end of paper, be sure to include a reference for papers that provided figures. In the case of Figure 1 it would be: Hartenstein, V. (1993). Atlas of Drosophila Development. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, NY.

8. Your other figures: Extract from sources that you find. Take framed screen shots and paste them into a page. Build a caption with the same format as above. Multiple pictures (“Panels”) in a figure need to be labelled A, B, C.. etc., and your caption needs to walk the reader thru the panels.

9. Consider carefully how you referred to the other figures back in the Intro and Body. What details did you say that are pertinent to understanding the figures? What details should you add to the captions to further explain the figures? Between the text and the caption, the reader should be made to understand both the general and the specific details of the figures. I should show you examples of how these things play out.

10. A realistic point is that for these other figures you might not want to use every panel in the original figure, and you may want to combine pictures from different original sources to build a unique figure. Ask me if this is not clear. A figure with multiple panels should have a normal progression of panel labels (Like A, B, etc.). You may need to over-write those labels in the original to put these in. You can also add your own labels. I should show you examples of these.

11. Write captions for these figures are as in Fig. 1. Triple spaced for draft. Cite the source papers in the caption. If you combined pictures from different papers one figure, each needs to be briefly cited in the caption. Ask me if you are not sure about how to do this. Of course all sources of figures get included as full citations in your paper.