Insights on poster preparation practices in life sciences

Posters are intended to spark scientific dialogue and are omnipresent at biological conferences. Guides and how-to articles help life scientists in preparing informative visualizations in poster format. However, posters shown at conferences are at present often overloaded with data and text and lack visual structure. Here, I surveyed life scientists themselves to understand how they are currently preparing posters and which parts they struggle with. Biologist spend on average two entire days preparing one poster, with half of the time devoted to visual design aspects. Most receive no design or software training and also receive little to no feedback when preparing their visualizations. In conclusion, training in visualization principles and tools for poster preparation would likely improve the quality of conference posters. This would also benefit other common visuals such as figures and slides, and improve the science communication of researchers overall

Community-developed checklists for publishing images and image analysis

Images document scientific discoveries and are prevalent in modern biomedical research. Microscopy imaging in particular is currently undergoing rapid technological advancements. However for scientists wishing to publish the obtained images and image analyses results, there are to date no unified guidelines. Consequently, microscopy images and image data in publications may be unclear or difficult to interpret. Here we present community-developed checklists for preparing light microscopy images and image analysis for publications. These checklists offer authors, readers, and publishers key recommendations for image formatting and annotation, color selection, data availability, and for reporting image analysis workflows. The goal of our guidelines is to increase the clarity and reproducibility of image figures and thereby heighten the quality of microscopy data is in publications.Comment: 28 pages, 8 Figures, 3 Supplmentary Figures, Manuscript, Essential recommendations for publication of microscopy image dat

Community-developed checklists for publishing images and image analyses

Images document scientific discoveries and are prevalent in modern biomedical research. Microscopy imaging in particular is currently undergoing rapid technological advancements. However, for scientists wishing to publish obtained images and image-analysis results, there are currently no unified guidelines for best practices. Consequently, microscopy images and image data in publications may be unclear or difficult to interpret. Here, we present community-developed checklists for preparing light microscopy images and describing image analyses for publications. These checklists offer authors, readers and publishers key recommendations for image formatting and annotation, color selection, data availability and reporting image-analysis workflows. The goal of our guidelines is to increase the clarity and reproducibility of image figures and thereby to heighten the quality and explanatory power of microscopy data