Hand-drawn figures in papers were common in the old days. If I use hand-drawn figures (generated e.g. with the software Paint) for illustrations, will that result in a rejection of my manuscript?
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1I remember seeing this paper when it was published in 2018: doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.97.075405 Haven't seen any more recent papers with hand-drawn figures in journals I pay attention to.– AnyonCommented Dec 1 at 6:10
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41If I use hand drawn figures (generated with e.g. desktop software paint) --- Interestingly, this is NOT what a "hand drawn figure" had always meant to me. To me, a hand drawn figure is when you draw with pencil or pen on a clean/empty standard size sheet of paper, but allowing the use a straight edge, compass, and other "desk drawer" devices for straight lines, circles, etc. Sometimes you might trace over a figure from another source (e.g. an octahedron) if you have little drawing skill.– Dave L RenfroCommented Dec 1 at 11:59
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7@DaveLRenfro Indeed. My mother is a technical illustrator, and I commissioned her to draw a figure for my PhD thesis. It is hand drawn, but very skillfully and professionally so.– Xander HendersonCommented Dec 1 at 13:50
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3In my previous comment I was very close to the comment character-limit so I didn't include the following, but perhaps it's worth mentioning anyway. A hand drawing in which nothing else is used (e.g. no use is allowed of a straight edge, compass, or other "desk drawer" device) is called a freehand drawing.– Dave L RenfroCommented Dec 1 at 20:55
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2Technical illustration, as discussed by @XanderHenderson, is a wonderful (and now rare) skill. For a literal toy example, see this question, and my answer in which a comparison is made to modern computer-aided design software. The pen-and-ink technical drawings of many old textbooks are often still the clearest illustrations available in monochrome. Many of those would have been done using a drawing board with perpendicular rulers.– Chris HCommented Dec 2 at 9:39
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5 Answers
Whether we like it or not, verdicts on publishability from editors and reviewers are consciously and subconsciously affected by non-scientific aspects of a manuscript like quality of English, typesetting, and quality of figures. This is justified to some extent as the diligence scientists put into these things broadly correlates with the diligence they put into their research. (Some readers may be affectionate to the vibe of a theoretician who doesn’t even touch a computer to create illustrations, but I wouldn’t speculate on this.)
Therefore, you usually want your manuscript to be at the best you can achieve with reasonable effort in these respects. Because of how humans work, this particularly applies to first impressions, and your figures will be one of the first impressions most readers get of your paper. Finally, this effect is self-enhancing since readers expect you to be aware of this and therefore may be particularly sensitive to anything of sub-par quality.
Now, for every hand-drawn plot or diagram¹, there is one done with a plotting software or vector-graphics program that is at least slightly better in terms of readability, clarity, precision, etc. And it only becomes slightly if you mastered this skill, despite it being rarely taught nowadays. I therefore would suggest that you spend at least half a day trying to create your figure with a plotting software or vector-graphics program. If this seems like a lot of time for you, remember that you can re-use this skill for your next figure and learning how to make a good hand-drawing takes as much time². After this, compare your results to your hand drawing and submit whatever has the highest quality – ideally according to other people like co-authors, colleagues, etc.
It’s very unlikely that your manuscript will be explicitly rejected for using a sub-par figure (be it hand-drawn or badly computer-generated), but it’s possible that this was tipping the scales or pushed a reviewer’s mind in the bad direction.
¹ Very rarely, a comic or similar is a good way to illustrate a scientific concept, even in a paper. These may work better when hand-drawn.
² A second big advantage of using these tools is that they make it much easier to change figures when needed.
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5"Whether we like it or not, editors and reviewers are consciously and subconsciously affected by non-scientific aspects of a manuscript like quality of English, typesetting, and quality of figures. This is justified to some extent as the diligence scientists put into these things broadly correlates with the diligence they put into their research." The reason why people care about the "quality of English, typesetting, and quality of figures" is not at all that it supposedly correlates with something else. Commented Dec 1 at 12:25
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1@AdamPřenosil: I edited to clarify the context. Of course, there are other reasons to care for these aspects, but these do not affect the decision or recommendation whether to publish a manuscript or not, which is what this question is aiming at.– Wrzlprmft ♦Commented Dec 1 at 14:16
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“We’ve found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway).” — Eric Raymond– giddsCommented Dec 3 at 13:40
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"the diligence scientists put into these things broadly correlates with the diligence they put into their research" Not that I doubt it, but is there any (non-anecdotal) evidence to back up this claim?– MEMarkCommented Dec 4 at 7:31
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1@ Wrzlprmft: I think you’re missing @AdamPřenosil’s point. These aspects (at least quality of English and quality of figures) can seriously affect the scientific quality of a paper — a bad writeup of good research is still a bad paper — and as such they can absolutely affect referee/editor judgements, and rightly so.– PLLCommented Dec 4 at 17:18
No ... but if your figures look messy & unprofessional, you can expect a stream of requests to improve your figure(s), from all three of reviewer + editor + publisher. The publisher might even offer to have professional illustrators redraw it for you, for a fee.
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2The publisher might even offer to redraw it for you, using professional software, for a fee. – I would find it much more important if the publisher used a professional or competent illustrator. Also, we live in a time where a skilled user can produce excellent software with freely available software, and hence software availability is not a relevant issue for this.– Wrzlprmft ♦Commented Dec 2 at 10:50
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1@Wrzlprmft I don't understand your comment. The publisher employs illustrators (these are the people who, e.g., come up with journal covers). Also while the software is certainly out there, not everyone knows or wants to know how to use them (like the OP).– AllureCommented Dec 2 at 11:08
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1@Allure: I agree and that’s more or less exactly my point: It should be about the illustrators not the software. Yet, you are writing about the software, not the illustrators.– Wrzlprmft ♦Commented Dec 2 at 14:01
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2@Allure: EMSes are probably an entirely different beast in that respect. The publisher redrawing something does not even imply that they are using professional illustrators (in the sense of being experts not that of being paid for it). My point is to write something like “The publisher might even offer to have professional illustrators redraw it for you” instead of “The publisher might even offer to redraw it for you, using professional software”.– Wrzlprmft ♦Commented Dec 2 at 14:49
Your example of Paint is often used as a shorthand for poor quality figures, though it has improved since it gained that reputation. There's still no reason to use it.
In general, diagrams should be created using vector drawing software. Free (open source, also cross-platform) tools are very good. I recommend Inkscape though for an easier learning curve, LibreOffice Draw is good and even the tools built in to Word and PowerPoint can do some basic figures. Visio is supposed to be good if you have a licence. Inkscape in particular is also very useful for modifying PDF output of graphing software (annotations, highlights, etc.).
You'll really feel the benefit of using vector graphics if you end up reusing (and probably modifying) your figure for a poster or other large format; in general editing figures for reviewer comments is far easier when you have lines and boxes rather than just pixels.
There are sometimes cases for raster graphics but even if journals require raster formats this is best done as an export step from a vector master file. If you do have to work with raster files, you can do better than Paint, using GIMP (free) or Photoshop (expensive). One reason to prefer these is their tools for drawing straight and orthogonal lines, but they also make it easier to more at sufficiently high resolution for printing.
Whatever tools you use, learn how to draw lines that actually connect to each other, and are horizontal/vertical rather than just off. There are plenty of tutorials online.
Good figures take some work, especially at first, and it's worth picking up the skills early on in your career. As this is a paper (as opposed to a thesis) you're likely to have co-authors. I assume the main burden of the paper figures falls on you, but there may be some help (advice, demonstrations of the tricky bits) available from more experienced colleagues; I've done that often enough.
BTW this is from an applied physics perspective, with some background in engineering
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7Or just draw it directly in latex, tikz obviously comes to mind. Commented Dec 2 at 9:59
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@infinitezero I've been known to do that too, for some things (such as flowcharts and some circuit diagrams, or hybrid circuit/block diagrams). For other things I might export from CAD software. But I left out both of those options as including a lot of extra learning and being further removed from starting point.– Chris HCommented Dec 2 at 10:02
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@infinitezero I love LaTeX and usually hate WYSIWYG, but for diagrams meant to be perceived by the human visual system, a visual editor is often better. Commented Dec 2 at 22:41
wrzlprmft's advice is sound, but has in my opinion an important caveat, which I will illustrate with two examples.
- I learned today that Roger Penrose, famous mathematical physicist of quantum mechanics and general relativity and also geometer, is famous for using hand-drawn illustrations in his work: open-access example from 2014 here. His geometric intuition is considered a major part of his scientific success, and his method of illustration could play some role in that.
- A couple of years ago I got to listen to a beautifully hand-painted lecture by Lillian Pierce, a professor of mathematics at Duke University. The presentation was an important part of the experience.
If you can produce artwork of that quality—retaining all the necessary features of the science/engineering while adding to the overall manuscript—then by all means do so! But I think it's quite a bit easier to create figures of acceptable quality with a computer; my own visual art skills are certainly not up to the task.
Note that "created by hand" here applies equally well to digital artwork created with MS Paint, GIMP, Inkscape, more expensive tools, and so on. The difference is whether it's created artistically/"freehand" or programmatically (e.g., in TikZ).
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3It may be true that some researchers are artists (and I know some) but most aren’t, or at least not good enough to have their hand drawn figures of sufficient quality for a journal. Commented Dec 3 at 1:19
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1There is some really good hand drawn work in science communication as well. If that style is something you aspire to, it's probably worth looking at what works and what doesn't, starting with visual note taking for your own benefit, then using it in collaborative work and seeing how well it's received. Even if you don't get to the point of publishable illustrations (I know I couldn't) the ability to sketch ideas clearly during a discussion is very helpful in science– Chris HCommented Dec 3 at 6:45
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One of my favourite mathematicians still only uses chalk for his presentations, and at the end of the lecture the whole board is covered in a balanced, neatly spread, logically structured, succinct summary of the whole even though subsequent items have been written in various places (so not filled the board left-to-right-and-top-to-bottom). I would never attempt this, I can't even figure out my own notes let alone inflict them on the public. Commented Dec 3 at 9:21
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1That's kind of an odd example of Penrose's drawings, because they seem to be slides for a talk and aren't the professional quality drawings found in his books. You can find some examples of the latter if you skip your way through this talk of his: youtube.com/watch?v=B1O4XPAU5m4– N. VirgoCommented Dec 3 at 23:43
The best thing to do is to consult the submission guidelines for the journal in question - e.g., Physical Review. I have never seen anything prohibiting hand-made figures... in fact, until a few decades ago most figures were submitted this way, alongside the handwritten or typed manuscript. Today many journals switched to accepting mostly (and often exclusively) online submissions, so that figures would have to be submitted as a file, with sufficiently good quality to enable further processing.
What has to be kept in mind is that figures would be seen by reviewers - if their hand-made nature impacts negatively on their readability, this will be pointed out. One also has to keep in mind that it may affect the impressions of the readers, when the paper is published. Of course, this can work both ways - increasing the reader's understanding and pleasure, if the illustrations are beautiful and to the point - e.g., illustrations in Zagoskin's and Mattuck's books are well-known in the community (like respectively Feynmann rules! and Self-consistent Kondo dog.)
