How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Photographs and micrographs
How to prepare effective photographs
Preparing the tables and figures

Life is not about significant details, fixed in a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.

—Susan Sontag

Photographs and micrographs

If your paper is to be illustrated with one or more photographs, there are several factors to keep in mind.

The most important factor to worry about is the value of the photographs for the story you are presenting. The value can range from essentially zero (in which case, like useless tables and graphs, they should not be submitted) to a value that transcends that of the text itself. In many studies of cell ultrastructure, for example, the significance of the paper lies in the photographs. If photographs (such as electron micrographs) are of prime importance to your story and you are publishing in a journal with a print version, ensure that the journal you choose has high-quality reproduction standards, as discussed in Chapter 6.

As with graphs, the size (especially the width) of the photograph in relation to the column and page width of the journal can be important. Try to avoid dimensions that will require excessive reduction of the photograph to suit the journal page.