Page 316 - English for Writing Research Papers

304

17.11 What about legends and captions?

A typical mistake is to repeat word for word the caption / legend to your fi gures and
tables within the main text. Legends should have a number. They should be as short as

possible and be sufficiently detailed to enable your readers to understand the fi gure or
table without having to read your text. It is vital that you pay attention to legends as some

readers may only look at your figures and tables, without even reading the paper itself!

Note that when referring to a figure in the text, the word “Figure” is abbreviated as
“Fig.”, while “Table” is not abbreviated. Both words are spelled out completely in
descriptive legends (see 27.1 and 27.2 in English for Academic Research : Grammar ,
Usage and Style ).

The rest of this subsection is taken directly from the biology website at Bates
College – a special thanks to Greg Anderson for allowing me to reproduce it.
Although Greg’s advice relates to biologists, much of it is true for other hard sci-
ences as well.

Every figure and table included in the paper MUST be referred to from the text. Use

sentences that draw the reader’s attention to the relationship or trend you wish to
highlight, referring to the appropriate Figure or Table only parenthetically:

Germination rates were significantly higher after 24 h in running water than in controls

(Fig. 4).
DNA sequence homologies for the purple gene from the four congeners (Table 1) show
high similarity, differing by at most 4 base pairs.

Avoid sentences that give no information other than directing the reader to the
Figure or Table:

Table 1 shows the summary results for male and female heights at Bates College.

Like the title of the paper itself, each legend should convey as much information as
possible about what the Table or Figure tells the reader:

• what results are being shown in the graph(s) including the summary statistics
plotted

• the organism studied in the experiment (if applicable),

• context for the results: the treatment applied or the relationship displayed, etc.

• location (ONLY if a fi eld experiment),