Preparing the figure legends section for a scientific paper: descriptive or declarative? (CC070)
Channel: Riffomonas Project
Date: 2021-02-08

Writing the figure legends section of a manuscript can be hard. Should the title of each figure be descriptive or should it declare to the reader what we want them to see? How much detail should we include in our figure legends? Should each figure's caption be long or short? At least most of us can agree that our figures should be included with each legend in this section. In this episode of Code Club, I'll share my approach to developing declarative figure legends and we'll create compressed TIFF files for our manuscript.

This episode is part of a larger arc of episodes investigating the sensitivity and specificity of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs), also known as exact sequence variants (ESVs) and operational taxonomic units (OTUs). ASVs are growing in popularity for analyzing microbial communities using 16S rRNA gene sequences. Proponents think that they should supplant operational taxonomic units (OTUs). What do you think? Pat demonstrates these concepts by live coding at the command line interface using GitHub Flow, Make, and RStudio.

The accompanying blog post can be found at http://www.riffomonas.org/code_club/2021-02-08-figure-captions

You can also find complete tutorials for learning R with the tidyverse using...
Microbial ecology data: http://www.riffomonas.org/minimalR/
General data: http://www.riffomonas.org/generalR/

0:00 Introduction
1:08 Example captions
5:15 Example caption with inline R code
13:48 References to figures in body of manuscript
17:26 Fancy things to do with figure references
18:03 Converting figure formats
24:28 Conclusion