Figures in manuscripts
Yet manuscript review is still stuck in the dark ages. Most journal submission procedures I am familiar with still require the figures to be separate documents from the text. The figures are then appended to the back of the file when the online submission engine creates the final pdf.
Why? Why do we do this? Why not allow the authors to format the manuscript in a pdf with the figures inserted as the authors feel best? If necessary high-resolution figures could be required to be appended and the publisher could even require a parallel figure-free copy of the manuscript text for their own typesetting purposes.
Couldn’t agree more! When reviewing, I would prefer to have a version of the manuscript as close to the formatting it will finally appear in, but I realize that isn’t necessarily easy if authors use different word processing systems where not all can get a template that gets close to the final form, but at least we could get the figures in the text close to where they are referred to so I don’t have to check three different places every time a figure referred to (the main text, the sheet with the figure legends, and the actual figure).
May 4th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
I did a postdoc in a computer science department, and had to admit that the CS/math way of manuscripts (all done in LaTeX, with templates provided by the journal/conference) makes a lot of sense — in many cases, what I submitted was *literally* what was printed, with no additional typesetting.
But biology journals don’t in general accept LaTeX (PLoS journals are among the few that do). And of course even if journals accept it, good luck finding an experimental collaborator who knows LaTeX. Instead, biology is stuck in the Word+Endnote+a bunch of figure files era.
May 5th, 2010 at 6:09 am
I’m from a computer science background myself and can related to what you write.
In CS we mainly publish in conference proceedings and not so much in journals, and in many proceedings we submit the LaTeX source and that is what goes into the final version.