| name | bjps-tables-figures |
| description | Use when building tables and figures for a British Journal of Political Science (BJPS) manuscript so exhibits are self-contained, accessible, fit Cambridge's size limits, and earn their place under the word budget. Designs exhibits; it does not run the analysis. |
Tables & Figures (bjps-tables-figures)
Exhibits are where an expert reviewer checks whether the result is real. At BJPS they must also fit
Cambridge's physical limits — tables within roughly 190 × 120 mm, figures within roughly
200 × 133 mm at ≥ 300 dpi (待核实 exact current figures) — and they count against the word budget,
so every exhibit must pull its weight.
When to trigger
- Designing the main results table/figure or a key descriptive exhibit
- Deciding what belongs in the article vs. the online appendix
- A reviewer found an exhibit unclear, mislabeled, or non-self-contained
- Trimming to the word cap by moving exhibits to the appendix
Principles
- Self-contained. A reader should understand each exhibit from its title, axis/column labels, and
note alone — without hunting through the text. State units, sample, N, and what the estimate is.
- Figures over dense tables for effects. Coefficient/forest plots, marginal-effects and
predicted-probability plots, event-study and RD plots communicate magnitude and uncertainty better
than a wall of coefficients. Show intervals.
- Accessible. Colourblind-safe palettes; legible in grayscale; no chartjunk, no 3D, no needless
colour. Reviewers and readers must parse it quickly.
- Fit Cambridge's limits. Size tables/figures to the page box; supply figures at ≥ 300 dpi in a
vector or high-resolution format; keep fonts legible after reduction (待核实 exact specs).
- Main text vs. appendix. Keep the few exhibits that carry the argument in the article; move
balance tables, full specifications, and robustness grids to the online appendix (excluded from
the word count). This is also how you fit under the word cap.
- Reproducible. Each exhibit is generated by the master script; numbers match the deposited
replication package exactly (see
bjps-transparency-and-data).
Discipline-specific exhibits
- Maps for geographic/spatial variation; network diagrams where structure is the point.
- Conjoint AMCE plots; survey-experiment treatment-effect plots.
- Cross-national panels: keep country/year labelling legible; avoid spaghetti plots.
- For qualitative work: timelines, causal-process diagrams, evidence tables linking claims to sources.
Execution bridge (StatsPAI / Stata MCP)
Generate exhibits from the fitted result, not by retyping numbers (the usual source of
body-vs-supplement drift). Full map: execution-with-mcp. BJPS is comparative/IR-heavy — cross-country panels with confounded institutions; emphasize fixed effects, clustering, and weak-IV-robust inference.
- Tables:
etable (multi-model columns) or did_summary_to_latex straight from the
result_id.
- Figures:
plot_from_result / enhanced_event_study_plot / event_study_table —
axis units and the SE/clustering note baked in.
- Every note names the estimator + clustering and states the effect size in
interpretable units.
See a full fitted-result → exhibit chain in the JF execution walkthrough.
Anti-patterns
- Tables that require the prose to be intelligible (not self-contained)
- Reporting significance stars with no effect size or interval
- Cramming every robustness check into the main text (blows the word budget — use the appendix)
- Colour-only encoding that fails in grayscale or for colourblind readers
- Figures supplied below 300 dpi or oversized for Cambridge's page box
- Exhibit numbers/values that don't match the deposited code output
Output format
【Main exhibit】what it shows + why a figure/table
【Self-contained?】title + labels + note + N/units present? [Y/N]
【Accessible?】grayscale-legible + colourblind-safe? [Y/N]
【Fits Cambridge box?】size + ≥300 dpi? [Y/N]
【Article vs appendix】split decided, word-budget impact noted
【Reproducible?】generated by master script, matches package? [Y/N]
【Next】bjps-writing-style
The one-exhibit test (BJPS-specific)
For each main exhibit, ask: Could a reader outside my subfield, who skips the prose, grasp the
finding and its uncertainty from this exhibit alone? If not, it is either under-labelled or doing too
much. BJPS's broad readership means the carrying exhibit must be legible to a generalist — a dense
country-specific table that only an area specialist can read is a positioning failure as much as a
design one. Keep one decisive figure in the main text; relegate the supporting grid to the appendix.
Calibration anchors (hedged)
- Exhibits cost words and page space, and BJPS holds figures to Cambridge's size and resolution box —
design for the printed page, not just the screen (待核实 exact current specs).
- Because the materials are deposited to the BJPolS Dataverse, every printed number must trace to the
master script; an exhibit the deposited code cannot regenerate is a transparency liability.
- A figure with intervals almost always beats a stars-only table for showing magnitude and uncertainty
to a cross-subfield reader.
Supplementary resources
