I am presenting several (11) data sets in a written communication (my dissertation). I have grouped the data separating it into several figures which fill two and a half pages, one after the other. Each figure shows the same three subplots, just with the new data set.
Is it better to include the same caption in each set of subfigures (a fifth of the page each time) or to reference the previous caption?
The first option would repeat the something like the following (this is a mock example):
Fig 6. 2x167 in 10–200 mM KCl: (a) shows the reduced intensity for the varied sample conditions with the inset showing a key region. (b) shows how the scale applied to each data as a function of the concentration. (c) shows the time dependence.
The second option would have subsequent captions that look something like the following:
Fig 7. 3x167 in 10–200 mM KCl: (a)–(c) as labeled in Fig. 6.
Edit: I was originally inclined to do the first as I am not short on space, but the fact that they are identical has made me less certain. Also, with the captions, two of the groups each fill a page, breaking up the overlapping sentence significantly. This would be somewhat less of a problem if I had more to say about the figure, but I do not need a page of text to explain the differences. I could put them all in an appendix, and only show an example (or make them smaller, as long as the labels do not get too small).