How to make an infographic — #1 Communication in science

Communication is an important part of scientific life. And it’s not only text, but also visual! Do you know how to make an infographic for your research paper? In addition to research and getting solid data, a researcher needs to know how to present their work and communicate well. Finally it is time to scientists stop talking only with theirs pairs. Discover how to make an infographic and reach waaaaaay more people out of your bubble.

Failed scientific communication creates a gap between science and society. This issue increase pseudoscience, like the vaccine controversy, reduce the funding for scientific research and interest in science by the people in general.

Scientific infographics improving communication in science

Create graphical abstracts, infographics and awesome presentations is a good strategy as it helps you catch up the audience attention and reach more people. In an infographic you should to show all the relevant information of your work in a clear, visually enjoyable way, so that the reader will be able to understand it by himself.

If you aren’t convinced yet, there are more reasons to use infographics in science:

• Infographics show statistic data in a more intuitive and easy-to-use way, with numbers and text of different sizes, depending on their importance and priority, and images and symbols that help your reader. The arrangement of the elements in a infographic helps a dynamic reading and with a quick glance you can understand the main information.
• An infographic has a huge potential to become popular and shared. The reason is because it is visually appealing and easy to share in social media, emails and more.

The Economist magazine published in June 2016 that articles with diagrams and graphs tend to be much more cited (about 60% are cited). And more, articles with diagrams reach up to 120%:

Articles with graphs and diagrams are more citated

Sanchis-Segura and Spanagel published an article in 2006 with comics illustrations to present the experiments done with mices in the laboratory. This article had more than 160 citations, while their other articles published in the same year but without this visual resource did not exceed 50 citations.

Sanchis-Segura and Spanagel 2006: An awesome article with several illustrations

But well, I know, we are scientists and in general. We do not study how to improve our communication and design skills.

Most of all, our goal is to improve scientific communication. Therefore, Mind the Graph designers created an awesome content to help not-designers-scientists. They’ll show how to make an infographic to present your research and stop to communicate only with your pairs.

See the rest of our How to make an infographic posts. In addition, our subscribers will receive by email an extra material, designed exclusively to Mind the Graph subscribers.

Enter the website to check this out.

Post series by Mind the Graph

• #1 Post — Communication in science
• #2 Post — Make your data Awesome
• #3 Post — The right kind of chart
• #4 Post — Let’s talk about colors!
• #5 Post — Less is more: minimalist infographic design
• #6 Post — Mistakes to avoid in science communication
• #7 Post — A shortcut summary to GET IT DONE

This post is the first of the How to Make an Infographic series, with tips and practical examples. The posts are a guide, made by our designers. They make the amazing illustrations and templates you see on our platform. Also, you can get for free our ebook. Learn how to make science infographics and improve your presentations

Originally published at Mind The Graph.