| name | the-canonical-figure |
| description | Use when planning figures, at study design and again before writing. Covers the figures a paper in this field is expected to contain, why an original figure does not substitute for a standard one, and how to decide what to draw first. |
Draw the field's standard figure before your own
Every field has one or two figures a paper of that kind is expected to contain.
A reader looks for them first, and their absence is read as the analysis not
having been done — even when the same information is present somewhere else, in
a table, in prose, or inside a figure you designed yourself.
Some examples of the shape, not a checklist:
- Bayesian parameter inference is expected to show the joint posterior — a corner
or triangle plot over the parameters — not only marginal summaries or a table
of medians and intervals.
- An iterative optimiser is expected to show objective against iteration, log
scale, your method and the baseline on the same axes.
- Anything trained is expected to show the learning curves: training and
validation loss against epoch, on the same panel, so overfitting is visible.
- A spatial field is expected to be shown as a map, per epoch or lead time,
beside the reference field — not summarised into one error number.
- A classifier is expected to show the curve its threshold moves along, not one
operating point.
Why your own figure does not substitute
You will usually find something more interesting than the standard plot, and it
is right to show it. But an original figure answers a question the reader did
not ask yet. The standard one answers "did the thing work, in the way this field
checks that". Publish both, standard first.
How to decide
At design time, before any results exist, ask: what figures does a paper making
this kind of claim always contain? Put those in the plan as the first slots.
Then add the figures your specific angle needs.
If you cannot produce a standard figure — the run does not have that quantity —
say so where it would have gone, in one sentence, rather than leaving the reader
to notice the absence.
