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Content

As the team describe in a paper posted (http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.04951) on arXiv, they found that figures did indeed matter-but not all in the same way. An average paper in PubMed Central has about one diagram for every three pages and gets 1.67 citations. Papers with more diagrams per page and, to a lesser extent, plots per page tended to be more influential (on average, a paper accrued two more citations for every extra diagram per page, and one more for every extra plot per page). By contrast, including photographs and equations seemed to decrease the chances of a paper being cited by others. That agrees with a study from 2012, whose authors counted (by hand) the number of mathematical expressions in over 600 biology papers and found that each additional equation per page reduced the number of citations a paper received by 22%. This does not mean that researchers should rush to include more diagrams in their next paper. Dr Howe has not shown what is behind the effect, which may merely be one of correlation, rather than causation. It could, for example, be that papers with lots of diagrams tend to be those that illustrate new concepts, and thus start a whole new field of inquiry. Such papers will certainly be cited a lot. On the other hand, the presence of equations really might reduce citations. Biologists (as are most of those who write and read the papers in PubMed Central) are notoriously mathsaverse. If that is the case, looking in a physics archive would probably produce a different result.