How to make an infographic #1 - Communication in science

Discover how to make an infographic

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 for scientists to stop talking only with their pairs. Discover how to make an infographic and reach waaaaaay more people out of your bubble.

This post is the first of the How to Make an Infographic series, with tips and practical examples. This series is a guide made by Mind the Graph designers.

If you want to learn more about how to make an infographic this series is for you.

The power of disinformation

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.

Click on the image to check out Mind the Graph Templates.

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’s attention and reach more people.

In an infographic, you should present 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%:

grafico-01 — 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 mice in the laboratory. This article had more than 160 citations, while their other articles were published in the same year but without this visual resource did not exceed 50 citations.

Capture — 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 awesome content to help not-designers-scientists. They’ll show how to make an infographic to present your research and stop communicating only with your pairs.

Or you can also start your infographic right now.