Meeting of the neuroimaging team, Thursday 15th June 2017

At this meeting, Nisha presented some very preliminary results from her research to members of the neuroimaging department. Gill attended the meeting as an observer and it quickly became obvious that there was a specialised written language to learn, as well as a visual language. To that end, a glossary has been added to this website, to keep a record of all of the neuroscience terms and acronyms that arise during the collaboration.

The meeting also emphasised to Gill the over-riding importance of the experimental results, and how these results are visually communicated, when compared to any conceptual figures that are used to describe the experimental process. It is therefore understandable that conceptual figures are often limited, in both number and size, even if they are trying to communicate a lot of complex information. This is particularly true when publishing in journal articles, where space is often at a premium.

The journals that may be approached to publish the research were also discussed. The choice of journal immediately places constraints on the conceptual figures that are produced for an article, in terms of image size, fonts used for annotation, length of the figure legend, etc., and these constraints vary for each journal. In some cases, a figure that is produced in colour for online publication may actually be printed in black and white, in order to reduce costs. This colour change should be taken into account when producing the figure, to ensure it still communicates effectively in both situations, and this places more demands on the person who is generating the figure.