Here, we’ve put together some tips on how to clearly explain any revisions that you want someone else to make in an image to get the best possible presentation.
Although most people adapt to the track changes functions of word processing software pretty quickly, it becomes a little harder to get your ideas together make revisions when you are working on images. This extra barrier can result in people settling for less polished figures in their manuscripts. Make sure your know how you are going to handle revisions to figures before you start working on a paper together. These tools can help you organize, communicate and share your ideas.
1. Talk about it
If you’re in the same lab/building/campus then make time to meet and explain any changes you want to see to your co-worker face-to-face. Use a projector and white board, give them a chance to explain the figure then have your say and point out any changes you’d like to see. If its not easy for you to get together there are plenty of tools that can help you work things out at a distance. The simplest solution for most cases is Skype screen sharing.
2. Write about it
For any straightforward changes to a figure that are easy to explain you don’t always need to have a full meeting. Particularly for long distance collaborations it might not be easy to make time to talk online or in person so short written messages are an important way of communicating. Consider that you or your coworkers might not be speaking the same language as native speakers. If English is the Lingafranca of your lab you don’t need to write full sentences. Keep the instructions short but make it clear what you are referring to (especially if there are lots of figures or you have many on going projects.
Traditionally these messages would go in an E-mail or as comments in the main manuscript file. Other tools are now available online that can improve the communication between you and your co-workers and keep track of the revisions you make. Dropbox is a useful install for personal use and can also help you share and work on files with other people. Large image or data files might exceed the limits that you can send by email, so make sure you have some way of sharing these.
Google should get a mention here as it might not be your go-to academic email client but does have some great features that allow secure collaborative work on all kinds of documents. You would struggle to write a full research paper using Google Docs but can definitely help at the outlining stage and for sharing drafts of images.
3. Draw it
Sometimes the only why to explain something is to draw a picture and try and explain what you mean. It doesn’t have have to be pretty and you don’t necessarily need full featured drawing software to make yourself understood. If you can meet in person then print out a copy of the figure and doodle on the page or draw what you want to see on a white board.
If you want to send sketches or figure annotations electronically the basic paint tool on windows or the mark up tools in preview for Mac are lightweight and often good enough for these purposes.
You might also consider other browser based tools and add-ons for standard drawing programs that can allow you to sketch on a image together online. Of the ones we have tested Twiddla stands out as one of the sites best suited to collaborative drawing for academics. There are minimum setup requirements on both sides and a solid interface for collaborating on images and websites making it useful for talking about published papers.
5. Get help
Sometimes you know the changes you want are beyond the abilities of your co-workers. May be you could put in the time to learn the software and make the images yourself but between teaching, meetings, writing and keeping up to date with your research field where do you find that time? Many manuscript editing services offer figure editing as part of their services, which can improve the appearance of figures. Nano Pico specialized in graphic services tailored to supporting researchers improve their figure presentation. We can identify and fix most common mistakes in figures and give expert feedback on details that can greatly improve the readability of your figures.