Stata graph tips for academic articles
In this blog post, we will go over several tips for optimizing Stata graph for academic articles. In contrast to other data visualization guides, which are a combination of colors, and lots of code, here we want to go back to the basics and focus on which works best for papers.
While social media, blogs, and websites, give us a lot of space to post high-resolution, and fairly sophisticated visualizations, in journals we are highly constrained for space. Articles are usually written on A4 or Letter page sizes. For example, let’s take A4, which has a dimension of 210 x 297 millimeters, or 8.25 x 11.75 inches. If we subtract the margins, which are usually 2 cms or about 1 inch on all the sides, we are talking about very restricted space for figures. Furthermore, when presenting results, graphs are usually inserted in pairs per row. Very rarely we seen one very large figure. Therefore, the space for our graphs shrinks even further as we are now talking about half a page width with additional margins. As an example, you can read about the Elsevier recommendations here:
