picture in research paper

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Using Images and Non-Textual Materials in Presentations, Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

• Documenting and Citing Images
• Finding Images - Select Sources

Documenting and Citing Images/Photographs and Their Sources

Please note that this is advice on best practices and considerations in documenting and citing images and non-print materials. It does not represent legal advice on obtaining permissions.

Generally, images copied from other sources should not be used without permissions in publications or for commercial purposes. Many American academic institutions require graduate students to archive their finished and approved theses/dissertations in institutional electronic repositories and/or institutional libraries and repositories, and/or to post them on Proquest's theses database. Unpublished theses and dissertations are a form of scholarly dissemination. Someone else's images, like someone else's ideas, words or music, should be used with critical commentary, and need to be identified and cited. If a thesis/dissertation is revised for publication,  waivers or permissions from the copyright holder(s) of the images and non-textual materials must be obtained. Best practices also apply to materials found on the internet and on social media, and, properly speaking, require identification, citation, and clearance of permissions, as relevant.

Use the following elements when identifying and citing an image, depending on the information you have available . It is your responsibility to do due diligence and document as much as possible about the image you are using:

• Artist's/creator's name, if relevant;
• Title of the work/image, if known, or description;
• Ownership information (such as a person, estate, museum, library collection) and source of image;
• Material, if known, particularly for art works;
• Dimensions of the work, if known.

The Chicago Manual of Style online can be searched for norms on appropriate ways to caption illustrations, capitalize titles of visual works, or cite print materials that contain images.

Including images/photographs in a bibliography:

Best practice is to not include images within a bibliography of works cited. It is common, instead, to create a separate list of images (or figures) and their source, such as photographer (even if it's you) or collection. It may be useful to also include location, e.g., museum, geographic reference, address, etc.

Examples of Documenting Images

The image below is scanned from a published book. It can be used in a critical context within a presentation, classroom session, or  paper/thesis, as follows:

[ Figure 1. This photograph from 1990 shows the Monument against Fascism designed by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, Hamburg, 1986-1993. Image from James Young, ed.,  Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York: Prestel, 1994), 70]

If you need to use this image in a published work, you will have to seek permission. For example, the book from which this image was scanned should have a section on photo credits which would help you identify the person/archive holding this image.

The image below was found through Google Images and downloaded from the internet. It can be used in a critical context within a presentation,  classroom session, or paper/thesis, as follows:

[Figure 2. This image shows the interior of Bibliotheca Alexandrina designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta in 2001. Image downloaded from https://mgkhs.com/gallery/alexandria in March 2016.]

If you want to use this image in a published work, you will have to do your best to track down its source to request permission to use. The web site or social media site where you found the image may not be an appropriate source, since it is common for people to repost images without attribution. Just because "everyone does it" does not mean that you should be using such materials without attribution or documentation. In this specific example, you may need to write to the photographer or to the architecture firm. If you have done due diligence and were unable to find the source, or have not received a response, you may be able to use an image found on the internet with appropriate documentation in a publication.

The image below was downloaded from a digitized historic collection of photographs held by an institutional archive. It can be used in a critical context within a presentation,  classroom session, or paper/thesis, as follows:

[Figure 3. In the 1920s the urban landscape of Los Angeles started to change, as various developers began building multi-family apartment houses in sections previously zoned for single family dwellings. Seen in this photograph by Dick Whittington is the Warrington apartment building, which was completed in 1928, surrounded by older single family structures. Downloaded from the USC Digital Library in February 2016]

I f you plan to use this photograph in a publication, seek permission from the library/institution from whose digital archive you downloaded the image. Contact information is usually found in the record for the image.

The image below was taken by the author. It can be used in a critical context within a presentation, classroom session , paper/thesis, or a publication* as follows:

[Figure 4. Genex Tower, also known as West City Gate, is a residential tower located in New Belgrade. This example of late 20th century brutalist-style architecture was designed in 1977 by Mihajlo Mitrović. Photographed by the author in 2013.]

*Please note, if you re-photographed someone else's photograph or a work of art, or if you re-photographed a published image, you may not be able to publish your photograph without first seeking permission or credit for its content.  If you have done due diligence and were unable to find the source or have not received a response, you may be able to use your image with appropriate documentation.

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• Last Updated: Jan 19, 2023 3:12 PM
• URL: https://libguides.usc.edu/fair_use

• Ask a Librarian

Locating and Using Images for Presentations and Coursework

• Free & Open Source Images
• How to Cite Images
• Alt Text Image Descriptions

Copyright Resources

• Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States from Cornell University Library
• Copyright Overview from Purdue University
• U.S. Copyright Office
• Fair Use Evaluator
• Visual Resources Association's Statement of Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study
• Creative Commons Licenses

Attribution

Again, the majority of images you find are under copyright and cannot be used without permission from the creator. There are exceptions with Fair Use, but this Libguide is intended to help you locate images you can use with attribution (and in some case, the images are free to use without attribution when stated, such as with stock images from pixabay). ***Please read about public domain . These images aren't under copyright, but it's still good practice to include attribution if the information is available. Attribution : the act of attributing something, especially the ascribing of a work (as of literature or art) to a particular author or artist. When you have given proper attribution, it means you have given the information necessary for people to know who the creator of the work is.

Citation General Guidelines

Include as much of the information below when citing images in a paper and formal presentations. Apply the appropriate citation style (see below for APA, MLA examples).

• Image creator's name (artist, photographer, etc.)
• Title of the image
• Date the image (or work represented by the image) was created
• Date the image was posted online
• Date of access (the date you accessed the online image)
• Institution (gallery, museum) where the image is located/owned (if applicable)
• Website and/or Database name

Citing Images in MLA, APA, Chicago, and IEEE

• Directions for citing in MLA, APA, and Chicago MLA: Citing images in-text, incorporating images into the text of your paper, works cited APA 6th ed.: Citing images in-text and reference list Chicago 17th ed.: Citing images footnotes and endnotes and bibliography from Simon Fraser University
• How to Cite Images Using IEEE from the SAIT Reg Erhardt Library
• Image, Photograph, or Related Artwork (IEEE) from the Rochester Institute of Technology Library

Citing Images in Your PPT

Currently, citing images in PPT is a bit of the Wild West. If details aren't provided by an instructor, there are a number of ways to cite. What's most important is that if the image is not a free stock image, you give credit to the author for the work. Here are some options:

1. Some sites, such as Creative Commons and Wikimedia, include the citation information with the image. Use that citation when available. Copy the citation and add under the image. For example, an image of a lake from Creative Commons has this citation next to it:  "lake"  by  barnyz  is licensed under  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

2. Include a marker, such as Image 1. or Figure 1., and in the reference section, include full citation information with the corresponding number

3. Include a complete citation (whatever the required format, such as APA) below the image

4. Below the image, include the link to the online image location

5. Hyperlink the title of the image with the online image location

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• Last Edited: Jun 8, 2023 3:28 PM
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How to cite images and graphs in your research paper

Table of Contents

If you are confused about whether you should include pictures, images, charts, and other non-textual elements in your research paper or not, I would suggest you must insert such elements in your research paper. Including non-textual elements like images and charts in the research paper helps extract a higher acceptance of your proposed theories.

An image or chart will make your research paper more attractive, interesting, explanatory, and understandable for the audience. In addition, when you cite an image or chart, it helps you describe your research and its parts with far more precision than simple, long paragraphs.

There are plenty of reasons why you should cite images in your research paper. However, most scholars and academicians avoid it altogether, losing the opportunity to make their research papers more interesting and garner higher readership.

Additionally, it has been observed that there are many misconceptions around the use or citation of images in research papers. For example, it is widely believed and practiced that using pictures or any graphics in the research papers will render it unprofessional or non-academic. However, in reality, no such legit rules or regulations prohibit citing images or any graphic elements in the research papers.

You will find it much easier once you know the appropriate way to cite images or non-textual elements in your research paper. But, it’s important to keep in mind some rules and regulations for using different non-textual elements in your research paper. You can easily upgrade your academic/ research writing skills by leveraging various guides in our repository.

In this guide, you will find clear explanations and guidelines that will teach you how to identify appropriate images and other non-textual elements and cite them in your research paper. So, cut the clutter; let’s start.

Importance of citing images in a research paper

Although it’s not mandatory to cite images in a research paper, however, if you choose to include them, it will help showcase your deep understanding of the research topic. It can even represent the clarity you carry for your research topic and help the audience navigate your paper easily.

There are several reasons why you must cite images in your research paper like:

(i) A better explanation for the various phenomenon

While writing your research paper, certain topics will be comparatively more complex than others. In such a scenario where you find out that words are not providing the necessary explanation, you can always switch to illustrating the process using images. For example, you can write paragraphs describing climate change and its associated factors and/or cite a single illustration to describe the complete process with its embedded factors.

(ii) To simplify examples

To create an impeccable research paper, you need to include evidence and examples supporting your argument for the research topic. Rather than always explaining the supporting evidence and examples through words, it will be better to depict them through images. For example, to demonstrate climate change's effects on a region, you can always showcase and cite the “before and after” images.

(iii) Easy Classification

If your research topic requires segregation into various sub-topics and further, you can easily group and classify them in the form of a classification tree or a chart. Providing such massive information in the format of a classification tree will save you a lot of words and present the information in a more straightforward and understandable form to your audience.

(iv) Acquire greater attention from the audience

Including images in your research paper, theses, and dissertations will help you garner the audience's greater attention. If you add or cite images in the paper, it will provide a better understanding and clarification of the topics covered in your research. Additionally, it will make your research paper visually attractive.

Types of Images that you can use or cite in your research paper

Using and citing images in a research paper as already explained can make your research paper more understanding and structured in appearance. For this, you can use photos, drawings, charts, graphs, infographics, etc. However, there are no mandatory regulations to use or cite images in a research paper, but there are some recommendations as per the journal style.

Before including any images in your research paper, you need to ensure that it fits the research topic and syncs with your writing style. As already mentioned, there are no strict regulations around the usage of images. However, you should make sure that it satisfies certain parameters like:

• Try using HD quality images for better picture clarity in both print and electronic formats
• It should not be copyrighted, and if it is, you must obtain the license to use it. In short cite the image properly by providing necessary credits to its owner
• The image should satisfy the context of the research topic

You can cite images in your research paper either at the end, in between the topics, or in a separate section for all the non-textual elements used in the paper. You can choose to insert images in between texts, but you need to provide the in-text citations for every image that has been used.

Additionally, you need to attach the name, description and image number so that your research paper stays structured. Moreover, you must cite or add the copyright details of the image if you borrow images from other platforms to avoid any copyright infringement.

Graphs and Charts

You can earn an advantage by providing better and simple explanations through graphs and charts rather than wordy descriptions. There are several reasons why you must cite or include graphs and charts in your research paper:

• To draw a comparison between two events, phenomena, or any two random parameters
• Illustration of statistics through charts and graphs are most significant in drawing audience attention towards your research topic
• Classification tree or pie charts goes best to show off the degree of influence of a specific event, or phenomenon in your research paper

With the usage of graphs and charts, you can answer several questions of your readers without them even questioning. With charts and graphs, you can provide an immense amount of information in a brief yet attractive manner to your readers, as these elements keep them interested in your research topic.

Providing these non-textual elements in your research paper increases its readability. Moreover, the graphs and charts will drive the reader’s attention compared to text-heavy paragraphs.

You can easily use the graphs or charts of some previously done research in your chosen domain, provided that you cite them appropriately, or else you can create your graphs through different tools like Canva, Excel, or MS PowerPoint. Additionally, you must provide supporting statements for the graphs and charts so that readers can understand the meaning of these illustrations easily.

Similarly, like pictures or images, you can choose one of the three possible methods of placement in your research paper, i.e., either after the text or on a different page right after the corresponding paragraph or inside the paragraph itself.

How to Cite Images and Graphs in a Research Paper?

Once you have decided the type of images you will be using in your paper, understand the rules of various journals for the fair usage of these elements. Using pictures or graphs as per these rules will help your reader navigate and understand your research paper easily. If you borrow or cite previously used pictures or images, you need to follow the correct procedure for that citation.

Usage or citation of pictures or graphs is not prohibited in any academic writing style, and it just differs from each other due to their respective formats.

Cite an Image/Graphs in APA (American Psychological Association) style

Most of the scientific works, society, and media-based research topics are presented in the APA style. It is usually followed by museums, exhibitions, galleries, libraries, etc. If you create your research paper in APA style and cite already used images or graphics, you need to provide complete information about the source.

In APA style, the list of the information that you must provide while citing an element is as follows:

• Owner of the image (artist, designer, photographer, etc.)
• Complete Date of the Image: Follow the simple DD/MM/YYYY to provide the details about the date of the image. If you have chosen a certain historical image, you can choose to provide the year only, as the exact date or month may be unknown
• Country or City where the Image was first published
• A Name or Title of the Image (Optional: Means If it is not available, you can skip it)
• Publisher Name: Organization, association, or the person to whom the image was first submitted

If you want to cite some images from the internet, try providing its source link rather than the name or webpage.

Format/Example of Image Citation:

Johanson, M. (Photographer). (2017, September, Vienna, Austria. Rescued bird. National gallery.

Cite an Image/Graphs in MLA (Modern Language Association) style

MLA style is again one of the most preferred styles worldwide for research paper publication. You can easily use or cite images in this style provided no rights of the image owner get violated. Additionally, the format or the information required for citation or usage is very brief yet precise.

In the MLA style, the following are the details that a used image or graph must carry:

• Name of the creator of the owner
• Title, Name, or the Description of the Image
• Website Or the Source were first published
• Contributors Name (if any)
• Version or Serial Number (if any)
• Publisher’s Details; at least Name must be provided
• Full Date (DD:MM: YYYY) of the first published Image
• Link to the original image

Auteur, Henry. “Abandoned gardens, Potawatomi, Ontario.” Historical Museum, Reproduction no. QW-YUJ78-1503141, 1989, www.flickr.com/pictures/item/609168336/

Final Words

It is easy to cite images in your research paper, and you should add different forms of non-textual elements in the paper. There are different rules for using or citing images in research papers depending on writing styles to ensure that your paper doesn’t fall for copyright infringement or the owner's rights get violated.

No matter which writing style you choose to write your paper, make sure that you provide all the details in the appropriate format. Once you have all the details and understanding of the format of usage or citation, feel free to use as many images that make your research paper intriguing and interesting enough.

If you still have doubts about how to use or cite images, join our SciSpace (Formerly Typeset) Community and post your questions there. Our experts will address your queries at the earliest. Explore the community to know what's buzzing and be a part of hot discussion topics in the academic domain.

Learn more about SciSpace's dedicated research solutions by heading to our product page. Our suite of products can simplify your research workflows so that you can focus more on what you do best: advance science.

With a best-in-class solution, you can handle everything from literature search and discovery to profile management, research writing, and formatting.

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Guide to Using Science Images for Research Papers

One easy way to include science images in your manuscripts is to download and customize them for your figures..

When downloading images from the internet to use in your scientific papers and presentations, you need to be careful that they match the copyright, resolution, and sizing rules that allow them to be used in academic journals. This science image guide provides tips to help you choose the right kinds of files that you can use to create your own impressive designs.

Which image format is best for research papers?

There are two categories of images that can be used for scientific publications: editable and uneditable. Editable images that can be fully customized and scaled without losing resolution are called vector files. Uneditable images don't allow you to adjust the design or color and come in wide range of formats from low to high resolution. Both of these image types can be used in scientific papers as long as you follow the proper copyright and resolution rules. Learn more about these image types and the different uses below.

1. Editable Images

The best kind of science images are editable vector files that allow you to customize the designs to best match the main points of your research. These include image file types such as Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg), Adobe Illustrator (.ai), Affinity Designer (.afdesign), Encapsulated PostScript (.eps), and some files in PowerPoint (.pptx) if they were drawn using PowerPoint shape tools.

Editable Image Tips:

• Editable images are important because some scientific journals, such as Science, require that you provide them with figures that are formatted using editable vector files.
• Be cautious of using images and database tools that only offer limited design customization options such as BioRender. Partially editable images can be difficult to make an illustration that looks professional and seamless with your data and other designs.
• Vector images have customizable sizes, resolution and transparent backgrounds, so you can always scale the image and insert it into any background.
• Make sure you follow the copyright rules associated with your image download. Some vector image databases require attribution and others allow you to use them for any purpose.

How to Find Editable Images

The easiest ways to find editable images is to explore science image databases or use Google search. I recommend using the search terms "drawings", "vector art", or "vector images" paired with the image type keyword.

The example below shows the Google Image search results for "cancer cell drawings" with a variety of different options for downloading different types of science images. You will still need to make sure that the image is available as a vector file type to be fully editable (e.g. SVG, AI, or EPS file types). Most vector images will require some sort of payment or subscription to download the high resolution files and use without copyright issues.

1. Uneditable Images

The second best format is uneditable images. Common uneditable image types are PNG, TIFF, or JPEG formats and these can be incorporated into your scientific figures and presentations as long as they have high enough resolution and have copyright rules that allow you to use them in academic publications. 

Uneditable image tips:

• Check the resolution of downloaded images to make sure they are high enough to use in scientific publications without looking grainy or unclear (see the "How to check image resolution" instructions in the section below). 
• Try to find PNG images with transparent backgrounds to make it easier to incorporate into your scientific figures and posters.
• Be very careful in checking the source of uneditable images and follow all copyright rules associated with the image. Uneditable image are more likely to have copyright rules associated with them that do not allow their use in scientific journals.

How to Find High Resolution and Transparent Images

The easiest ways to find high resolution and transparent images is to explore science image databases or use Google search. I recommend using the search terms "transparent background" and using the Google "Tools" feature to limit the search for "Large" images. 

The examples below shows the Google Large Image search results for "plant cell diagram transparent background" that show a variety of different options for downloading high resolution and transparent science images.

What image sizes are best for scientific publication?

Size and resolution are important because images need to be high resolution enough to show sharp shapes and lines when it is used in a printed or digital figure. Below are tips on how to choose the right image sizes and resolutions.

Image Resolution

Resolution is the most important aspect of a downloaded image or scientific figure and affects the sharpness of the details. A low-resolution image will have around 72 PPI and high resolution images are at least 300 PPI.

• Most scientific journals require images and figures to be at least 300 PPI/DPI.
• The "PPI" stands for Pixels Per Inch and is used when referring to digital file resolution and "DPI" stands for Dots Per Inch and is used for printing resolution.

How to Check Image Resolution:

• Windows computer: Right-click on the file, select Properties, then Details, and you will see the DPI in the Image section, labeled Horizontal Resolution and Vertical Resolution. 
• Mac computer: Open the image in Preview and select Tools, then Adjust Size, and find the label Resolution.

The size requirements will depend on how you plan to use the image. Most scientific journals use a maximum figure width of 180mm, so if you only plan to use images in scientific publications, then you only need them large enough to look sharp within a 180 mm wide figure (~600 pixels wide).

If you plan to use the image in presentation or posters slides, you will need to have much larger images to not have resolution issues when shown on a big screen that is 1280 x 720 pixels or printed on a poster that is approximately 48 x 36 inches.

How Can I Find Copyright-Free Images?

Copyright laws ensure that an image is only used in a way that is approved by the image creator. The best way to ensure that you download images with copyright rules that allow you to use them for academic journal submissions is to read the fine print on the image source. The summary below describes how to find images that are allowed for use in scientific papers.

Copyright License Review

Anyone who creates their own original artwork has the right to be acknowledged as the creator of that image. They automatically own the copyright for the image, which means that legally, they have the right to decide where and how that image can be used. In order to be able to use images in scientific papers, you will need to know what kind of copyright license is being used, which you can usually find by looking for the original source of the image or by reading the fine print of the image database.

Types of copyright licenses for scientific use:

• Public Domain  - Images generally become public domain after 70 years after the creator's death. If the copyright is not renewed on the creator's behalf, the image can become part of the ‘public domain’, and the copyright no longer applies.
• Creative Commons 4  - You can adapt and share the image in anyway you like, but this license requires attribution, so you will need to include the original creator in the acknowledgements of the research paper, posters, and acknowledged on your presentation slides.
• Stock Images  - Image databases that allow you to license the designs. Make sure to read the fine print on how you are allowed to use the image (e.g. personal and commercial uses). 

How to Find Copyright-Free Images:

Look for image databases that have copyright licenses that allow you to use the images "For personal, academic, and commercial projects and to modify it" such as: 

• FreePik  
• Simplified Science
• Wikimedia Commons

NOTE: Some copyright-free image databases may still require that you attribute the illustration to the original author in your scientific publication. Read the fine print to make sure you are using the image correctly!

Here is an example of Simplified Science Usage Rules for comparison to other image databases.

How to Use Downloaded Images in Publications?

After downloading images, the next step is to format them into your scientific designs. Two of the most common software tools that scientists use for figure formatting are Adobe Illustrator and PowerPoint. Below is a link to free online courses that show you how to use the downloaded images in your scientific publications and graphical abstracts.

Create professional science figures with illustration services or use the online courses and templates to quickly learn how to make your own designs.

Interested in free design templates and training.

Explore scientific illustration templates and courses by creating a Simplified Science Publishing Log In. Whether you are new to data visualization design or have some experience, these resources will improve your ability to use both basic and advanced design tools.

Interested in reading more articles on scientific design? Learn more below:

Scientific Presentation Guide: How to Create an Engaging Research Talk

Data Storytelling Techniques: How to Tell a Great Data Story in 4 Steps

Best Science PowerPoint Templates and Slide Design Examples

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How to Find and Choose the Best Images for Your Project

To spot high-quality images, you’ll need to draw on your basic visual literacy skills.

As we’ve been learning in this visual literacy column , images tell stories. From photographs to illustrations to maps, they offer glimpses into moments beyond our reach and help us better understand our world. Delving into a variety of visual materials, we’ve learned to recognize the elements that make up an image—such as composition , color , and symbolism —and understand how each contributes to an image’s overall interpretation or significance. Developing visual literacy skills such as these enhances our understanding and appreciation of all images—those we seek out intentionally and those we encounter by chance: a billboard passed during a commute, an image in a newspaper article, a photo shared on social media. It also helps us sort through and evaluate the quality of the images we see and make choices about which images are relevant for our specific purpose.

To take the next step in our journey towards visual literacy, we need to know where to find high-quality images that meet our research needs and what questions to ask about the images we decide to use.

Why Do You Need the Image?

When beginning to look for images or other visual material, it’s important to first understand the nature of your need, to ask yourself why you’re seeking out images in the first place. You might be using them to learn more about a current topic or to research different perspectives on a topic. Alternatively, you might simply be looking for something visually appealing or interesting to inspire you. Depending on your end goal, the types of images and places you’ll look are different.

What is the Topic You are Exploring?

When it comes to recognizing what kind of visual information you need to better understand a topic, it’s important to consider contextual factors such as the age and material of the image. A painting of a king in regalia from a historical period might offer valuable insights into the culture and customs around royalty of that time. Conversely, a more recent image of the same garments on display provides access to greater detail about the king’s clothing but loses some of the historical context and emphasis provided by the artist.

Age also affects the kind of information you can glean from an image. Are you attempting to understand a historical moment? Images produced at that time will provide something closer to a firsthand account, influenced by contemporaneous beliefs and contexts, while an image created much later will be interpreting and reflecting that moment with the benefit of hindsight.

Consider also the genre or format of image you are seeking. Different media types , such as photographs, illustrations, or infographics, can offer different information about a topic. For example, an infographic might provide a succinct summary of complex data while a photograph might offer a window into a specific event or moment. A work of art may provide a more emotional or visceral connection to a particular topic.

Who Made the Image?

It’s crucial to build an understanding of authorship and different perspectives. Think about who is creating and sharing the images and what their goals and motivations might be. We may also consider the creator’s personal beliefs, the context in which the image was created, and other factors that may shape an image.

We’ve discussed authorship in the context of bias and seeking multiple viewpoints , but it’s also beneficial to consider when you’re determining where to look for images. When seeking visual information, we often need a particular perspective.

Where Should You Look for Quality Images?

Just like finding images from various types of creators yields distinct results, you get different kinds of images depending on where you look for them. Although there are innumerable image resources available and easily accessible online, it’s important to seek out reliable and high-quality sources. These aren’t necessarily difficult to find and are usually free to use. Depending on your need, resources might include stock photo websites, public domain image collections, institutional archives—like museums or universities —and more. It’s also important to consider the context in which the image will be used, as certain sources might not allow for commercial use or might require attribution.

There are many resources available that provide access to high-quality images online, including:

• The Library of Congress has a vast collection of digitized images—including photographs, maps, and prints—from its own collections as well as other institutions. The images cover a wide range of topics, including American history, world cultures, and science and technology.
• AP Newsroom offers a vast archive of contemporary and historical news photos, covering a wide range of events and subjects from around the world. With a focus on journalism, this resource provides a window into the major news events of the past and present.
• Europeana is a digital library of cultural heritage collections from across Europe, including images, videos, and audio recordings.
• Getty Images is a commercial stock image company that also offers a large selection of historical images, including photographs, illustrations, and artwork. While not all images are free, Getty Images offers a substantial selection of images that can be licensed for use in research and educational settings.
• Digital Public Library of America provides access to millions of digitized materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. It includes a collection of historical images, including photographs, maps, and documents.
• Asia Art Archive collects and provides access to materials related to contemporary art and visual culture in Asia, including photographs, documents, and artworks.
• Digital South Asia Library , from the University of Chicago, provides access to digital materials related to South Asia, including historical photographs, manuscripts, and books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, the South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) is a collaborative, open-access resource for research, teaching, and learning about South Asia.
• Trove , provided by the National Library of Australia, includes a large collection of digitized historical images, including photographs, artworks, and maps, from Australia and the Pacific region covering a wide range of topics, including Australian history, culture, and society.
• Openverse is a Creative Commons search engine that allows users to find and use openly licensed images and other media for a variety of uses.

These are just a few examples of online resources that provide access to historical and contemporary images from across the world. Some of these and many other historical collections are also part of JSTOR Collections , providing an access point to explore a wide variety of visual material that you likely won’t find through Google. Exploring these and other sources can broaden your perspective on historical topics and discover unique images that can enhance your research.

By forming a clearer understanding of your initial needs as well as the likely context and sources in which relevant images may be found and used, you can better identify and locate the types of images that will best serve you. Actively seeking out reliable and high-quality sources will ensure that the images you use are accurate, ethical, and effective in enhancing your understanding of a topic.

In the next article, we’ll dive deeper into strategies for effectively finding the best images. In the meantime, try exploring JSTOR Collections and considering which of the images you find there might meet your research needs.

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Using Images in Publications

Many scholarly publications are enhanced with images, ranging from reproductions of fine art to graphs showing the results of scientific research. Including images in books and articles can complement the text, visually demonstrate the author's analysis, and engage the reader. Using images in publications, however, raises copyright issues, which can be complex, time-consuming, and expensive. To help authors navigate this process, publishers often provide specific guidance, including what rights must be requested, acceptable file formats, image resolution, etc. See Requesting 3rd party Permissions  from Oxford Journals or Image Guidelines from Johns Hopkins University Press as examples. 

The primary issues that you need to aware of when incorporating images in your publication are: 

The right to publish a copyrighted image is controlled by the copyright owner, so each copyrighted image that you use must have permission or fall within an exception to the general copyright statue, such as public domain, fair use, or open access. Copyright permission fees are sometimes waived or reduced for scholarly publications; if not, however, they can be quite expensive as well as time-consuming to obtain. We recommend that you begin the permissions process early to avoid any last-minute complications that may delay publication of your work. In addition to copyright permission, some museums and other providers of images charge a fee for the production or use of a digital image from their collections, even if the underlying work is in the public domain. Like permissions fees, use fees are sometimes waived or reduced for scholarly publications.

High resolution images

Publishers will require a high resolution image for publication (usually at least 300 ppi). These may come from museums, archives, other collections, your own work, or suppliers of stock photos. There may be a fee assessed for use, the amount of which can vary significantly depending on who is supplying the image and how you are using it.

Printing costs

The cost of printing images can be substantial for the publisher, so be sure to discuss with your editor how many images they will publish, whether they will be in color, and whether a subvention will be required if the manuscript contains a large number of images.

Privacy and publicity rights

If you have a photograph with people in it, there may be privacy or publicity rights that need to be addressed.

• Susan Bielstein,  Copyright Clearance: A Publisher's Perspective  (2005) (article begins on page 19)
• Susan Bielstein,  Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property  (2006) (ebook - Georgetown NetID required for off-campus access)
• Lois Farfel Stark, Obtaining Image Permissions for Your Book: An Author’s Perspective (2018)

Copyright Principles

Public domain.

If you can find a usable image in a book or journal article published before 1927, it will be in the public domain , and therefore free of any copyright restrictions. Certain images published between 1927 and 1989 may also be in the public domain, depending on if they were published with a copyright notice and if the copyright was renewed. For more information, use this public domain chart or contact [email protected] .

Works of the United States government are also in the public domain and may be used freely.

Some museums, libraries, and archives make public domain images freely available with few or no restrictions. Read more in the Finding Images  section.

Open Access / Creative Commons

Wikimedia Commons has a large collection of images that are licensed using the Creative Commons licensing system . Restrictions, if any, are listed with the image. It is important to recognize that if you use Wikimedia, you are relying on copyright information provided by the person uploading the image. You should review the copyright information carefully to be sure it appears to be accurate.

Many of the licenses in Wikimedia permit noncommercial uses only. The definition of noncommercial for purposes of the CC BY-NC license is, “NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.” Creative Commons provides some further guidance on how to  interpret  the NC license. 

Under certain circumstances, publishers may be comfortable with relying on fair use when publishing images accompanying scholarly works.

The guidelines in the College Art Association’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts set out the fair use arguments for using art for educational purposes: 

PRINCIPLE In their analytic writing about art, scholars and other writers (and, by extension, their publishers) may invoke fair use to quote, excerpt, or reproduce copyrighted works, subject to certain limitations:

Limitations

• The writer’s use of the work, whether in part or in whole, should be justified by the analytic objective, and the user should be prepared to articulate that justification.
• The writer’s analytic objective should predominate over that of merely representing the work or works used.
• The amount and kind of material used and (where images are concerned) the size and resolution of the published reproduction should not exceed that appropriate to the analytic objective.
• Justifications for use and the amount used should be considered especially carefully in connection with digital-format reproductions of born-digital works, where there is a heightened risk that reproductions may function as substitutes for the originals.
• Reproductions of works should represent the original works as accurately as can be achieved under the circumstances.
• The writing should provide attribution of the original work as is customary in the field, to the extent possible.

Your own work

If you have your own high resolution photograph, you may use it freely since you own the copyright in your photograph. If, however, your photograph is of a copyrighted work of art, permission of the artist will be required unless it is a fair use . Note that many museums do not allow photography of works in their collections, so obtaining your own image of a work of art may not be an option. While architectural works are subject to copyright protection, photographs of publicly viewable buildings may be used. 17 U.S.C. § 120(a) .

If your image does not fall into any of the above categories, you will need to request permission from the copyright holder for use of the image. You may be able to obtain permission from one of the sites listed in the next section, or you may need to request permission from the artists or their representatives. The Artists Rights Society represents the intellectual property rights interests of visual artists and their estates worldwide and covers works in private collections as well as museums and galleries. ARS has a request form for permissions requests. Note that ARS handles permission requests only and does not supply images of the works.

For more general information on requesting permission, visit our Requesting Permission page.

Finding Images

Museums, libraries, and archives.

Some museums, libraries, and archives have collections of public domain images available for use in scholarly publications. The content of the collections and the permitted uses vary among institutions. Many do not allow images to be used as cover art since that is usually considered to be a commercial use, and some limit use to print publications. Below is a list of libraries and museums that make works available with few or no restrictions. 

• British Library  - The British Library’s collection on flickr allows access to millions of public domain images from the Library's collections. Higher quality images, if required, are available for purchase through the British Library. For more information, visit the Library's Images Online page.  
• J. Paul Getty Museum  - The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. More information about the content of the collections is available on their  Open Content Program  page.
• Library of Congress - Prints and Photographs - This collection has over 1,200,000 digitized images from the Library's collections. Rights information is available for each image - look for the field marked "Rights Advisory." Many collections have no known restrictions on use. For further information about using the collection, read the Copyright and Other Restrictions That Apply to Publication/Distribution of Images . Information on restrictions on use by collection is also available.
• National Gallery of Art  - NGA Images is a repository of images  presumed to be in the public domain  from the collections of the National Gallery of Art. Users may download— free of charge and without seeking authorization from the Gallery— any image of a work in the Gallery’s collection that the Gallery believes is in the public domain and is free of other known restrictions.
• New York Public Library  - This collection contains more than 180,000 photographs, postcards, maps and other public-domain items from the library’s special collections in downloadable high-resolution files. High resolutions downloads are available with no permission required and no restrictions on use.
• Victoria & Albert Museum - These images of art from the collections of the V&A are available for academic publishing with some limitations (print runs up to 4,000 copies or 5 years online use). Read the full  terms and conditions  to see if your use qualifies.

Stock image sites

There are many companies that provide both a high quality image for publication and a license for publication. These sites usually have good selection of images, the images are high quality, and the search features are sophisticated. Licensing fees vary considerably and can be high, though you may be able to negotiate a discount for use in a scholarly publication.

For some of the sites listed below, the price will vary depending on which rights you need for publication: print/electronic, region of the world, number of languages, number of books, where the image will be placed (inside/cover), and size of the image. After entering that information, a license fee will display based on your use. The license fee is not automatically available for some images; for those, you will usually receive an email message after submitting your request. You should consult with your editor when selecting options to be sure you have selected the appropriate options for your book or article.

• Art Resource (license fee based on rights needed)
• Bridgeman Images (license fee based on rights needed)
• Getty Images (license fee based on rights needed)
• iStock (flat fee)
• Shutterstock (flat fee)

Artstor (Georgetown NetID required for off-campus access) is a subscription database that includes some images specifically licensed for academic publishing. These images are identified with “IAP” (Images for Academic Publishing) under the thumbnail image in your search results. Details of the use, including size of print run and credit line, vary among IAP images. You can view these by clicking on the IAP icon under the thumbnail image. The Terms and Conditions agreement displays when you download the image. Most Artstor images, however, are not in the IAP program and are not licensed for use in scholarly publishing. To use a non-IAP image in a book or article, you will usually need to request permission or go through a fee-based stock photo archive, often Art Resource, for a license. Artstor provides contact information for permissions in the "Rights" section of image information page.

You may also find usable images for publication on the sites listed on.

Additional options

• College Art Association's list of image sources
• Georgetown Library's Copyright and Multimedia: Images page
• Georgetown Library's Images LibGuide

Specific Uses

Cover images.

Images that appear on the cover of a book often require specific permission for that use and a higher fee.

Film frames

The Association of University Presses has this statement on fair use and film frames in their Permissions FAQ :

You may use frame enlargements and publicity stills (both from films and from television shows) when you can justify their inclusion in the work under fair use guidelines—for example, when it can be argued that the illustration serves as a quote from the filmic “text” to illustrate a point. Be conservative in selecting material—if the still or frame illuminates a point you are making or is specifically discussed, then the use may qualify as fair use. Where possible, limit the number of frames reprinted from any one film and from different films that represent the subject of your work. If your use is decorative, you must seek permission from the rightsholder to include it. When purchasing material from a photo agency, read the conditions stated on the agreement and on the back of the photo very carefully (particularly the fine print). In all cases, acknowledge the original copyright holder. For a more in-depth analysis of fair use as related to stills and frame enlargements, the fair use section of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies website offers a number of policy statements and disciplinary guidelines that may be useful.

If your use goes beyond fair use, or if your publisher has a more restrictive policy, you will need to get permission from the copyright owner. Most major film studios have a licensing division where you can submit a request –  MGM ,  Sony ,  Warner Brothers , Paramount Pictures ,   Universal , and Walt Disney Studios , for example. For smaller producers, you will need to contact them directly with your request.

Charts, graphs, and figures

There are differences among publishers with respect to what permissions they require for graphs, so a good first step is to consult with your editor on their policies. A few sample policies are:

• Princeton University Press - "Where a chart, graph, or table is being reproduced in a critical study of the work or to buttress an argument of the writer, no permission is needed. Data is not copyrightable. Unless there is a creative element to data depiction that is being reproduced without alteration, fair use can be asserted, with attribution."
• Harvard University Press - "Data is not protected by copyright. However, graphics like tables and charts are copyright protected if the data is organized or presented in a unique way or if the graphic provides interpretation of the data. If you plan to reprint a graphic from another source that is protected by copyright, please clear permission. If you plan to reprint existing tables and charts, adapt existing tables and charts, or create your own tables and charts that will not be subject to copyright protection, please refer to the following guidelines for credit: The standard way to credit tables and charts you are reprinting is: Source: Credit."
• Oxford University Press - "As a guide, you should always seek permission for:  . . . Pictures (paintings, drawings, charts, engravings, photographs, cartoons, and so on); Figures and maps; Tables."

There are permissions guidelines that many STM publishers use in setting policies for the reuse of images from their publications. The guidelines include gratis permission for the use of limited numbers of figures/tables/images from journal articles or books, though note that not all members have adopted policies exactly as written in the guidelines.

Many publishers who follow the STM guidelines, or who have similar policies, provide free permissions through the Copyright Clearance Center's Marketplace  so those requests are usually quick, easy, and free. The Marketplace system requires information about your publication and exactly what rights you are seeking. For charts, graphs, or figures that fall outside the guidelines, the license fees are often in the $20-$50 range, although that depends on many factors and could be higher or lower.

If you have questions about using images in a scholarly publication, please email [email protected] .

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How to include pictures in a research paper

It is often said that a picture can speak more than a thousand words. In all kinds of research papers, pictures are essential in adding to the richness of the literature and analysis because of the valuable insight they can offer. For example, pictures of measured data from statistical applications are very important additions to the “Data presentation and analysis” chapter or section of any research paper.

This is because they help to complement verbal discussions or analysis by offering a visual presentation of the statistical technique used to measure the variables of interest. However, where the researcher is not the originator of such pictures, it is very important to cite the source of the picture according to the prescribed format. In the case of statistical applications mentioned above, for example, be sure to disclose which application generated the picture or printout as well as the version of such an application (e.g., SPSS version 27).   

What is a research paper?

A research paper is a form of academic writing which involves formally investigating a field of knowledge or topic of interest in order to add to the existing stock of knowledge in that field and/or solve a particular problem. Educational research is formal because it is not based on the subjective discretions of the researcher but on an accepted and objective standard such as the scientific method of inquiry. Research papers can be of different types. These include term papers, seminar presentations, undergraduate projects, post-graduate thesis or dissertations, conference/workshop papers, and journal entries, among others.

Though these highlighted papers and others can be structured in diverse ways, conducting research in this context basically requires that the researcher identifies a problem or area of interest; formulates research questions and/or hypothesis; reviews the existing literature in the field; collects, measures and analyzes relevant data; discusses the findings; makes conclusions and recommendations based on the findings and then suggests possible directions for future research.

Some things to consider before including pictures in a research paper

As noted above, pictures can complement words to make a research paper richer in terms of providing more insight. However, the researcher must ensure that such pictures are optimally included to generate the desired effects. To this end, some of the tips below can help.

Ensure the picture adds value to your research paper

Pictures may be a necessary aspect of some research papers but this does not imply that they should not be selected meticulously and meritoriously. The researcher must critically evaluate all pictures he or she intends to include in their paper and select only the most relevant, i.e., those that will help illuminate verbal discussions/analysis and consequently deepen the understanding of readers.   

Proper labeling and citation

Research papers are formal documents with rules on how each of them should be written, structured, or formatted. Therefore, ensure that your pictures are labeled according to the rules provided by whoever the paper is meant for (such as a university department or a print journal). The rules are usually determined by Style Guides like the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Psychological Association, etc. Properly citing the sources of any picture you have borrowed is necessary to enable you avoid plagiarism.

Pictures should be suitably located

After toiling hard to gather the pictures needed for his or her research, the researcher should ensure that the selected pictures are appropriately inserted into the desired areas of the paper. In some social science projects and theses, for example, a tabular presentation of the data used for the research is located on the first page of the fourth chapter titled “Data presentation and analysis.”

Sometimes the researcher may have several pictures that cannot all be accommodated in the main body of a project or thesis/dissertation. In such instances, it will be appropriate to attach such pictures in the “Appendices” section at the end of the paper.

Carry the images along

The pictures do not serve as mere decorations but have been selected to help provide more insight and thus enrich the research paper. To this end, the researcher should ensure that the pictures are properly integrated into the verbal discussions or analysis in the paper.  For example, “Figure 1.0 is a graphical representation of all the differenced variables in the time series.” etc.

Citing pictures in a research paper

There are many kinds of pictures as well as picture sources and they can also be cited in a variety of ways. For simplicity, the examples in this article will focus entirely on how to cite digital (internet) pictures.

Format: Image Creator’s Last Name, First Name. “Image Title.”  Website Name , Day Month Year Published, URL.  

Example: Jones, Daniel. “The Hope Creek nuclear plant.” LearnersHub ,  9 November 2017, www.learnershub.net/2017/09/11/nuclear-technology-explained.html.

Chicago style

Format: Last Name, First Name. M [initials]. “Title.” Digital image. Website Title. Month Date, Year published. Accessed Month Date, Year. URL.

If the picture has no title, then a description can be used instead.

Date Accessed should only be included if the publication date is unavailable.

Example: Jones, Daniel R. “The Hope Creek nuclear plant.”Digital image. LearnersHub ,  Accessed 9 November 2017. www.learnershub.net.

Format: Author’s last name. First initial. (Publication or creation date). Title of image [Type of image]. Name of publisher. Museum or university. URL.

Example: Jones,  R. 2017.   The Hope Creek nuclear plant .[Photo]. National Science Museum. https//:www.nationalsciencemsuem.org/nuclearscience/2017/11/the-hope-creek-nuclear-plant.jpg.

Pictures of all kinds (including tables, charts, graphs, figures, photographs, etc) are useful components in a research paper. This is because of the insight they can bring by complementing verbal discussions and analysis. However, pictures should not be included in a research paper arbitrarily but follow some guidelines such as those presented above.

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Home / Guides / Citation Guides / Harvard Referencing / Harvard Referencing Style Examples / How to reference an image in Harvard style

How to reference an image in Harvard style

Referencing images can be confusing. Do you reference the photographer or the subject of the image itself? Do you include where you saw or found the image? What if you took the photograph yourself? This guide will help clear up the confusion!  

Below, the guide will cover how to cite images in different scenarios, both as an in-text citation and a reference. For each scenario, you will be given a citation structure, along with examples to illustrate each case.

Online images/photographs  

Today, finding and citing a digital or online image is simple. You’ll need the following information:

• Photographer’s name
• (Year published)  
• Title of the photograph, italizised
• Available at: URL (Accessed: the date you sourced the image)  

In-text citation structure and example:

(Photographer’s name, Year published)

Photographer’s name (Year published)

B.B. King’s beautiful Gibson semi-hollow body ES-355 guitar (Joseph, 2001) ……

Reference list structure and example:

Photographer’s Last Name, Initial. (Year published) Title of the photograph. Available at: URL (Accessed: the date you sourced the image)  

Joseph, J. (2001) Lucille. Available at: http://www.jackjoseph.co.uk/photo_23456.html (Accessed: 22 August 2016)

Online images/photographs from a curated collection  

As we know, the Internet has a vast repository of curated image collections, especially on sites like Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram, to name just a few. The rules stay pretty much unchanged in this case, as well.  

You will just need to direct the viewer/reader to the source where you viewed or uploaded the image. You may cite relevant information about images sourced from such Internet collections as follows:

• (Year published)
• Title of the photograph/collection, italicized

Photographs by Gustavo Grandissimo (2015) …

Grandissimo, G. (2015) The heights of abstraction. Available at: https://instagram.com/theheightsofabstraction (Accessed: 10 August 2012)

Images without a listed photographer or artist  

You may cite information about images without a listed creator. You’ll need the following information:

• Title of the photograph, italicized

As you can see in the image of the controversial protest rally ( Up in arms , 2019) …

Title of the photograph (Year published) Available at: URL (Accessed: the date you sourced the image)  

Up in arms (2019) Available at: http://www.therevolutionbeat.com/protests/2019/image_34567.html (Accessed: 10 March 2019)

Prints or slides

A print refers to a printed reproduction of a popular work of art or image. A slide, on the other hand, is a transparent photograph that consists of chromogenic dyes mounted inside a plastic frame to be projected onto a large screen.  

Information needed:

• [Photograph]
• Place of publication: Publisher’s name, if available

The expanding mushroom cloud from the resulting blast was captured on that fateful day (Tanaka, 1945)

Tanaka, N. (1945) The day Fat Boy fell to Earth [Photograph]. Hokkaido: Kurosawa Publishers  

Images photographed by you

It is not necessary to provide a reference to a photograph or image if you are the creator. However, check with your tutor about the most appropriate way to present original images or photographs in your work.

If you need to reference an original image, you can use the following citation structure:

• Your name (Year published or taken)

…lays emphasis on the fact that the sun doesn’t need to be the focus of a picture (Koenig, 2019)

Your Last Name, Initial. (Year published) Title of the photograph [Photograph]  

Koenig, K. (2019) The sunset [Photograph]  

Published October 29, 2020.

Harvard Formatting Guide

Harvard Formatting

• et al Usage
• Direct Quotes
• In-text Citations
• Multiple Authors
• Page Numbers
• Writing an Outline
• View Harvard Guide

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Home » Figures in Research Paper – Examples and Guide

Figures in Research Paper – Examples and Guide

Table of Contents

Figures in Research Paper

Figures play an essential role in research papers as they provide a visual representation of data, results, and concepts presented in the text. Figures can include graphs, charts, diagrams, photographs, and other visual aids that enhance the reader’s understanding of the research.

Importance of Figures in Research Paper

Here are some specific ways in which figures can be important in a research paper:

• Visual representation of data : Figures can be used to present data in a clear and concise way. This makes it easier for readers to understand the results of experiments and studies.
• Simplify complex ideas: Some concepts can be difficult to explain using words alone. Figures can be used to simplify complex ideas and make them more accessible to a wider audience.
• Increase reader engagement : Figures can make a research paper more engaging and interesting to read. They break up long blocks of text and can make the paper more visually appealing.
• Support arguments: Figures can be used to support arguments made in the paper. For example, a graph or chart can be used to show a correlation between two variables, providing evidence for a particular hypothesis.
• Convey important information: Figures can be used to convey important information quickly and efficiently. This is particularly useful when the paper is being read by someone who is short on time and needs to quickly understand the main points.

Types of Figures in Research Paper

There are several types of figures commonly used in research papers, including:

• Line graphs: These are used to show trends or changes in data over time.
• Bar graphs: These are used to compare data across different categories or groups.
• Pie charts: These are used to show proportions or percentages of data.
• Scatterplots : These are used to show the relationship between two variables.
• Tables : These are used to present large amounts of data in a structured format.
• Photographs or images : These are used to provide visual context or examples of the research being presented.
• Diagrams or schematics : These are used to illustrate complex processes or systems.

How to add Figures to Research Paper

Adding figures to a research paper can be a great way to visually convey important information to the reader. Here are some general guidelines for adding figures to your research paper:

• Determine the appropriate type of figure: Depending on the information you want to convey, you may want to use a graph, chart, table, photograph, or other type of figure.
• Label the figure: Give your figure a descriptive title and number it. Also, include a brief caption that explains what the figure shows.
• Place the figure in the appropriate location : Generally, figures should be placed as close as possible to the text that refers to them. For example, if you mention a figure in the middle of a paragraph, it should be placed within that paragraph.
• Format the figure appropriately: Ensure that the figure is clear and easy to read. Use consistent fonts and font sizes, and make sure the figure is large enough to be easily seen.
• Cite the source of the figure: If the figure was not created by you, you must cite the source of the figure in your paper. This includes citing the author or creator, the date of creation, and any relevant publication information.
• Consider copyright : Ensure that you have permission to use any figures that are copyrighted. If the figure is copyrighted, you may need to obtain permission from the copyright holder to use it in your paper.

How to Label Figures in Research Paper

Labeling figures in a research paper is an important task that helps readers to understand the content of the paper. Here are the steps to label figures in a research paper:

• Decide on the numbering system: Before labeling the figures, decide on the numbering system that you want to use. Typically, figures are numbered consecutively throughout the paper, with the first figure being labeled as “Figure 1,” the second figure as “Figure 2,” and so on.
• Choose a clear and concise caption: A caption is a brief description of the figure that appears below the figure. It should be clear and concise and should describe the content of the figure accurately. The caption should be written in a way that readers can understand the figure without having to read the entire paper.
• Place the label and caption appropriately: The label and caption should be placed below the figure. The label should be centered and should include the figure number and a brief title. The caption should be placed below the label and should describe the figure in detail.
• Use consistent formatting: Make sure that the formatting of the labels and captions is consistent throughout the paper. Use the same font, size, and style for all figures in the paper.
• Reference figures in the text : When referring to a figure in the text, use the figure number and label. For example, “As shown in Figure 1, the results indicate that…”

Figure 1. Distribution of survey responses

In this example, “Figure 1” is the figure number, and “Distribution of survey responses” is a brief title or description of the figure.

The label should be placed at the top of the figure and should be centered. It should be clear and easy to read. It’s important to use a consistent format for all figures in the paper to make it easier for readers to follow.

Examples of Figures in Research Paper

Examples of Figures in Research Papers or Thesis are as follows:

Line graphs Example

Bar graphs Example

Pie charts Example

Scatterplots Example

Tables Example

Photographs or images Example

Diagrams or schematics Example

Purpose of Figures in Research Paper

Some common purposes of figures in research papers are:

• To summarize data: Figures can be used to present data in a concise and easy-to-understand manner. For example, graphs can be used to show trends or patterns in data, while tables can be used to summarize numerical information.
• To support arguments : Figures can be used to support arguments made in the text of the research paper. For example, a figure showing the results of an experiment can help to demonstrate the validity of the conclusions drawn from the experiment.
• To illustrate concepts: Figures can be used to illustrate abstract or complex concepts that are difficult to explain in words. For example, diagrams or illustrations can be used to show the structure of a complex molecule or the workings of a machine.
• To enhance readability: Figures can make a research paper more engaging and easier to read. By breaking up long blocks of text, figures can help to make the paper more visually appealing and easier to understand.
• To provide context : Figures can be used to provide context for the research being presented. For example, a map or diagram can help to show the location or layout of a study site or experimental setup.
• To compare results : Figures can be used to compare results from different experiments or studies. This can help to highlight similarities or differences in the data and draw comparisons between different research findings.
• To show relationships : Figures can be used to show relationships between different variables or factors. For example, a scatter plot can be used to show the correlation between two variables, while a network diagram can be used to show how different elements are connected to each other.
• To present raw data: Figures can be used to present raw data in a way that is easier to understand. For example, a heat map can be used to show the distribution of data over a geographic region, while a histogram can be used to show the distribution of data within a single variable.

Advantages of Figures in Research Paper

Figures (such as charts, graphs, diagrams, and photographs) are an important component of research papers and offer several advantages, including:

• Enhancing clarity : Figures can help to visually communicate complex data or information in a clear and concise manner. They can help readers better understand the research and its findings.
• Saving space : Figures can often convey information more efficiently than text, allowing researchers to present more information in less space.
• Improving readability : Figures can break up large blocks of text and make a paper more visually appealing and easier to read.
• Supporting arguments: Figures can be used to support arguments made in the text and help to strengthen the overall message of the paper.
• Enabling comparisons: Figures can be used to compare different data points, which can be difficult to do with text alone. This can help readers to see patterns and relationships in the data more easily.
• Providing context : Figures can provide context for the research, such as showing the geographic location of study sites or providing a visual representation of the study population.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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Designing High-Quality Images for Research Papers and Theses: The Available Tools

Manuscripts express data collected from months or years of careful experimentation. However, raw data or narratives alone don’t make good journal articles. Data visualization tools and free drawing software enable scientists to explain their scientific story. By using tools to perfect scientific illustration, your manuscript can grab reviewers’ attention. More importantly, it will help your readers understand data quickly, increasing the likelihood of citing and sharing your research paper .

Why Image Quality Matters

  Journals have strict guidelines regarding figure/image quality (e.g. “dots per inch”/DPI or number of pixels per image). Editors and their staff will turn down manuscripts prior to review if the images are of insufficient quality. Furthermore, poor figure quality can leave a bad impression on readers and reviewers. So, when editing and creating scientific images, be sure to use scientific illustration software or drawing tools to make your data clear and understandable!

Tables can help communicate data quickly to readers, who are often short on time. For this reason, when you have a well-designed table, your paper can have a far greater impact. For this reason, your tables should have clear and descriptive titles, well-defined headings , aligned data entries in each cell, and clearly defined units for all data entries. Meanwhile, when designing figures, there are many tools available to researchers to create publication-ready images.

Related: Creating images for your research paper? Check out these resources and avoid image manipulation now!

Uses and Limitations of Common Tools

There is a myriad of tools available for scientists. Picking which one to work with depends on your computer literacy, budget, and desired outcomes.

R is a free statistics computing program that also facilitates graphics development. It works on a variety of operating systems. Furthermore, the default design choices for image rendering were made to generate publication-quality plots with ease. While it is free, it is not as user-friendly as subscription services, such as Prism, which allows for both data analysis and figure development.

ImageJ is a freely available software developed by the National Institutes of Health . In short, it is an image-processing program that allows users to edit, analyze, process, save, print, modify colors, and quantitate images . One of the more exciting features is its ability to generate stacks (a series of images) from videos or convert photos into videos. This is helpful for live cell imaging.

Inkspace is a quality vector graphics editor that is open sourced and provides flexible drawing tools . It has broad file format compatibility and a powerful text tool.

GIMP is a free image manipulation program that can be combined with plugins to enhance features. It requires greater computer literacy than most other image formatting tools.

Cytospace is an open source network for complex network analysis that helps users integrate, analyze, and visualize data. While it is free to use, it is not as user-friendly as Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, which allows for pathways to be designed and rendered artistically with great ease (for a fee, of course).

ImageMagick is another tool that can be used to read and write images in many commonly used formats (e.g., PNG, JPEG, FIG, TIFF, PDF, etc). For this reason, it can modify images in nearly any manner. It allows users to composite images, animate, manage color, decorate, draw, and delineate image features (e.g., edges of colors). Furthermore, it is compatible with multiple coding languages.

• While creating figures can be a fun process, it’s important to always do it correctly. First, check the required format for images prior to submitting. If you have to convert the image file, check to ensure that your DPI is still at least 300.
• Once ready to submit, carefully review figures for errors prior to publishing. One method of doing this is to print your figures in color and review them manually. This will help you spot oddities that may have otherwise been missed by an electronic review.
• When modifying your images for publication, never manipulate your images in a manner that is fraudulent. Western blots are often the most suspicious images available that will carefully be scrutinized by your reviewers.
• Finally, while a lot of data is helpful to have, be sure to reduce the presence of “chartjunk” – the unnecessary visual elements that distract the reader from what really matters…your data!

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Finding images.

Digital Collections at St. Lawrence University

A set of digital collections containing images from items in the University's Special Collections, Richard F. Brush Art Gallery along with faculty and student scholarship.

Google Image Search

Google provides both basic and advanced image searching for over 1 billion images. Google's  Advanced Image Search  searching allows you to limit results based on usage rights, by size and quite a bit more - as does the  Search Tools  button.

Digital Public Library of America  (DPLA)

Provides for searching across a massive number of digital collections located in libraries, archives and museums throughout the United States.  Includes georeferences and timelines.

30 Million items from a range of Europe's galleries, archives, libraries and museums.

Flickr Commons

Flickr provides a search specifically designed to locate works that are offered under the Creative Commons license.

Search.creativecommons.org  offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations. Note that selecting different search options within the result list—particularly Image search for Google and Yahoo—may lead to the inclusion of results which are not Creative Commons licensed.

American Memory - Library of Congress

Contains over 5 million images and other archived materials relating to American culture and history. Guidelines for citing and reproducing images are also included.

Wikimedia Commons

Associated with the Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons searches the images available in the online Wikipedia encyclopedia. Click on an image to view copyright restrictions.

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration

• Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory
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• Operational Significant Event Imagery
• Photo library
• Public Domain Tornado Images
• Tornados - National Severe Storms Laboratory Album

National Park Service

• Digital Image Archive
• Historic Photograph Collection

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

• Natural Hazzards
• Arizona Meteor Crater
• NASA Images
• Photo Gallery
• Visible Earth  - a searchable directory of images, visualizations, and animations of the Earth

U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Central Regional Library maintains a collection of over 400,000 photographs taken during geologic studies of the United States and its territories from 1868 to the present.These images provide a visual history of the discovery, development, and sciences of the United States and its Geological Survey. Some photographs have been used in USGS publications, but most have never been published.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service   National Image Library  is a searchable collection of selected images, historical artifacts, audio clips, publications, and video and that are in the public domain.

Bioscience Imagebank  This consists of freely available images contributed by academics, researchers, Learned Societies, industry and individuals with rights cleared for educational purposes.

 Additional Image Databases and Websites -  derived from Skidmore Library's list :

• Archives of American Art Image Gallery
• Art Resource
• Artcyclopedia
• Digitized Images from the Bodleian Libraries Special Collections
• Galaxy of Images
• Google Images
• LIFE Photo Archive
• NYPL Digital Gallery
• Perseus Digital Library
• VADS: The Online Resource for Visual Arts
• Visual Dictionary Online
• Web Gallery of Art
• Work Projects Administration (WPA) Poster Collection

Finding History Map Images

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection The University of Texas' extensive collection of printable maps - both modern and historical. David Rumsey Map Collection The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 10,000 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America maps and other cartographic materials.

A to Z Maps This is also the worlds largest subscription-based database of proprietary, royalty-free world, continent, country, and state maps. Included in the 145,000+ maps are: political maps, physical maps, outline maps, population maps, precipitation maps, climate maps, and other thematic maps. GIS data for states, countries, and global levels are also available in shapefile, e00, and mdb formats.

Our approach

• Responsibility
• Infrastructure
• Try Meta AI

RECOMMENDED READS

• 5 Steps to Getting Started with Llama 2
• The Llama Ecosystem: Past, Present, and Future
• Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding
• Meta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of Llama
• Today, we’re introducing Meta Llama 3, the next generation of our state-of-the-art open source large language model.
• Llama 3 models will soon be available on AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA NIM, and Snowflake, and with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.
• We’re dedicated to developing Llama 3 in a responsible way, and we’re offering various resources to help others use it responsibly as well. This includes introducing new trust and safety tools with Llama Guard 2, Code Shield, and CyberSec Eval 2.
• In the coming months, we expect to introduce new capabilities, longer context windows, additional model sizes, and enhanced performance, and we’ll share the Llama 3 research paper.
• Meta AI, built with Llama 3 technology, is now one of the world’s leading AI assistants that can boost your intelligence and lighten your load—helping you learn, get things done, create content, and connect to make the most out of every moment. You can try Meta AI here .

Today, we’re excited to share the first two models of the next generation of Llama, Meta Llama 3, available for broad use. This release features pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned language models with 8B and 70B parameters that can support a broad range of use cases. This next generation of Llama demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of industry benchmarks and offers new capabilities, including improved reasoning. We believe these are the best open source models of their class, period. In support of our longstanding open approach, we’re putting Llama 3 in the hands of the community. We want to kickstart the next wave of innovation in AI across the stack—from applications to developer tools to evals to inference optimizations and more. We can’t wait to see what you build and look forward to your feedback.

Our goals for Llama 3

With Llama 3, we set out to build the best open models that are on par with the best proprietary models available today. We wanted to address developer feedback to increase the overall helpfulness of Llama 3 and are doing so while continuing to play a leading role on responsible use and deployment of LLMs. We are embracing the open source ethos of releasing early and often to enable the community to get access to these models while they are still in development. The text-based models we are releasing today are the first in the Llama 3 collection of models. Our goal in the near future is to make Llama 3 multilingual and multimodal, have longer context, and continue to improve overall performance across core LLM capabilities such as reasoning and coding.

State-of-the-art performance

Our new 8B and 70B parameter Llama 3 models are a major leap over Llama 2 and establish a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales. Thanks to improvements in pretraining and post-training, our pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned models are the best models existing today at the 8B and 70B parameter scale. Improvements in our post-training procedures substantially reduced false refusal rates, improved alignment, and increased diversity in model responses. We also saw greatly improved capabilities like reasoning, code generation, and instruction following making Llama 3 more steerable.

*Please see evaluation details for setting and parameters with which these evaluations are calculated.

In the development of Llama 3, we looked at model performance on standard benchmarks and also sought to optimize for performance for real-world scenarios. To this end, we developed a new high-quality human evaluation set. This evaluation set contains 1,800 prompts that cover 12 key use cases: asking for advice, brainstorming, classification, closed question answering, coding, creative writing, extraction, inhabiting a character/persona, open question answering, reasoning, rewriting, and summarization. To prevent accidental overfitting of our models on this evaluation set, even our own modeling teams do not have access to it. The chart below shows aggregated results of our human evaluations across of these categories and prompts against Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, and GPT-3.5.

Preference rankings by human annotators based on this evaluation set highlight the strong performance of our 70B instruction-following model compared to competing models of comparable size in real-world scenarios.

Our pretrained model also establishes a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales.

To develop a great language model, we believe it’s important to innovate, scale, and optimize for simplicity. We adopted this design philosophy throughout the Llama 3 project with a focus on four key ingredients: the model architecture, the pretraining data, scaling up pretraining, and instruction fine-tuning.

Model architecture

In line with our design philosophy, we opted for a relatively standard decoder-only transformer architecture in Llama 3. Compared to Llama 2, we made several key improvements. Llama 3 uses a tokenizer with a vocabulary of 128K tokens that encodes language much more efficiently, which leads to substantially improved model performance. To improve the inference efficiency of Llama 3 models, we’ve adopted grouped query attention (GQA) across both the 8B and 70B sizes. We trained the models on sequences of 8,192 tokens, using a mask to ensure self-attention does not cross document boundaries.

Training data

To train the best language model, the curation of a large, high-quality training dataset is paramount. In line with our design principles, we invested heavily in pretraining data. Llama 3 is pretrained on over 15T tokens that were all collected from publicly available sources. Our training dataset is seven times larger than that used for Llama 2, and it includes four times more code. To prepare for upcoming multilingual use cases, over 5% of the Llama 3 pretraining dataset consists of high-quality non-English data that covers over 30 languages. However, we do not expect the same level of performance in these languages as in English.

To ensure Llama 3 is trained on data of the highest quality, we developed a series of data-filtering pipelines. These pipelines include using heuristic filters, NSFW filters, semantic deduplication approaches, and text classifiers to predict data quality. We found that previous generations of Llama are surprisingly good at identifying high-quality data, hence we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3.

We also performed extensive experiments to evaluate the best ways of mixing data from different sources in our final pretraining dataset. These experiments enabled us to select a data mix that ensures that Llama 3 performs well across use cases including trivia questions, STEM, coding, historical knowledge, etc.

Scaling up pretraining

To effectively leverage our pretraining data in Llama 3 models, we put substantial effort into scaling up pretraining. Specifically, we have developed a series of detailed scaling laws for downstream benchmark evaluations. These scaling laws enable us to select an optimal data mix and to make informed decisions on how to best use our training compute. Importantly, scaling laws allow us to predict the performance of our largest models on key tasks (for example, code generation as evaluated on the HumanEval benchmark—see above) before we actually train the models. This helps us ensure strong performance of our final models across a variety of use cases and capabilities.

We made several new observations on scaling behavior during the development of Llama 3. For example, while the Chinchilla-optimal amount of training compute for an 8B parameter model corresponds to ~200B tokens, we found that model performance continues to improve even after the model is trained on two orders of magnitude more data. Both our 8B and 70B parameter models continued to improve log-linearly after we trained them on up to 15T tokens. Larger models can match the performance of these smaller models with less training compute, but smaller models are generally preferred because they are much more efficient during inference.

To train our largest Llama 3 models, we combined three types of parallelization: data parallelization, model parallelization, and pipeline parallelization. Our most efficient implementation achieves a compute utilization of over 400 TFLOPS per GPU when trained on 16K GPUs simultaneously. We performed training runs on two custom-built 24K GPU clusters . To maximize GPU uptime, we developed an advanced new training stack that automates error detection, handling, and maintenance. We also greatly improved our hardware reliability and detection mechanisms for silent data corruption, and we developed new scalable storage systems that reduce overheads of checkpointing and rollback. Those improvements resulted in an overall effective training time of more than 95%. Combined, these improvements increased the efficiency of Llama 3 training by ~three times compared to Llama 2.

Instruction fine-tuning

To fully unlock the potential of our pretrained models in chat use cases, we innovated on our approach to instruction-tuning as well. Our approach to post-training is a combination of supervised fine-tuning (SFT), rejection sampling, proximal policy optimization (PPO), and direct preference optimization (DPO). The quality of the prompts that are used in SFT and the preference rankings that are used in PPO and DPO has an outsized influence on the performance of aligned models. Some of our biggest improvements in model quality came from carefully curating this data and performing multiple rounds of quality assurance on annotations provided by human annotators.

Learning from preference rankings via PPO and DPO also greatly improved the performance of Llama 3 on reasoning and coding tasks. We found that if you ask a model a reasoning question that it struggles to answer, the model will sometimes produce the right reasoning trace: The model knows how to produce the right answer, but it does not know how to select it. Training on preference rankings enables the model to learn how to select it.

Building with Llama 3

Our vision is to enable developers to customize Llama 3 to support relevant use cases and to make it easier to adopt best practices and improve the open ecosystem. With this release, we’re providing new trust and safety tools including updated components with both Llama Guard 2 and Cybersec Eval 2, and the introduction of Code Shield—an inference time guardrail for filtering insecure code produced by LLMs.

We’ve also co-developed Llama 3 with torchtune , the new PyTorch-native library for easily authoring, fine-tuning, and experimenting with LLMs. torchtune provides memory efficient and hackable training recipes written entirely in PyTorch. The library is integrated with popular platforms such as Hugging Face, Weights & Biases, and EleutherAI and even supports Executorch for enabling efficient inference to be run on a wide variety of mobile and edge devices. For everything from prompt engineering to using Llama 3 with LangChain we have a comprehensive getting started guide and takes you from downloading Llama 3 all the way to deployment at scale within your generative AI application.

A system-level approach to responsibility

We have designed Llama 3 models to be maximally helpful while ensuring an industry leading approach to responsibly deploying them. To achieve this, we have adopted a new, system-level approach to the responsible development and deployment of Llama. We envision Llama models as part of a broader system that puts the developer in the driver’s seat. Llama models will serve as a foundational piece of a system that developers design with their unique end goals in mind.

Instruction fine-tuning also plays a major role in ensuring the safety of our models. Our instruction-fine-tuned models have been red-teamed (tested) for safety through internal and external efforts. ​​Our red teaming approach leverages human experts and automation methods to generate adversarial prompts that try to elicit problematic responses. For instance, we apply comprehensive testing to assess risks of misuse related to Chemical, Biological, Cyber Security, and other risk areas. All of these efforts are iterative and used to inform safety fine-tuning of the models being released. You can read more about our efforts in the model card .

Llama Guard models are meant to be a foundation for prompt and response safety and can easily be fine-tuned to create a new taxonomy depending on application needs. As a starting point, the new Llama Guard 2 uses the recently announced MLCommons taxonomy, in an effort to support the emergence of industry standards in this important area. Additionally, CyberSecEval 2 expands on its predecessor by adding measures of an LLM’s propensity to allow for abuse of its code interpreter, offensive cybersecurity capabilities, and susceptibility to prompt injection attacks (learn more in our technical paper ). Finally, we’re introducing Code Shield which adds support for inference-time filtering of insecure code produced by LLMs. This offers mitigation of risks around insecure code suggestions, code interpreter abuse prevention, and secure command execution.

With the speed at which the generative AI space is moving, we believe an open approach is an important way to bring the ecosystem together and mitigate these potential harms. As part of that, we’re updating our Responsible Use Guide (RUG) that provides a comprehensive guide to responsible development with LLMs. As we outlined in the RUG, we recommend that all inputs and outputs be checked and filtered in accordance with content guidelines appropriate to the application. Additionally, many cloud service providers offer content moderation APIs and other tools for responsible deployment, and we encourage developers to also consider using these options.

Deploying Llama 3 at scale

Llama 3 will soon be available on all major platforms including cloud providers, model API providers, and much more. Llama 3 will be everywhere .

Our benchmarks show the tokenizer offers improved token efficiency, yielding up to 15% fewer tokens compared to Llama 2. Also, Group Query Attention (GQA) now has been added to Llama 3 8B as well. As a result, we observed that despite the model having 1B more parameters compared to Llama 2 7B, the improved tokenizer efficiency and GQA contribute to maintaining the inference efficiency on par with Llama 2 7B.

For examples of how to leverage all of these capabilities, check out Llama Recipes which contains all of our open source code that can be leveraged for everything from fine-tuning to deployment to model evaluation.

What’s next for Llama 3?

The Llama 3 8B and 70B models mark the beginning of what we plan to release for Llama 3. And there’s a lot more to come.

Our largest models are over 400B parameters and, while these models are still training, our team is excited about how they’re trending. Over the coming months, we’ll release multiple models with new capabilities including multimodality, the ability to converse in multiple languages, a much longer context window, and stronger overall capabilities. We will also publish a detailed research paper once we are done training Llama 3.

To give you a sneak preview for where these models are today as they continue training, we thought we could share some snapshots of how our largest LLM model is trending. Please note that this data is based on an early checkpoint of Llama 3 that is still training and these capabilities are not supported as part of the models released today.

We’re committed to the continued growth and development of an open AI ecosystem for releasing our models responsibly. We have long believed that openness leads to better, safer products, faster innovation, and a healthier overall market. This is good for Meta, and it is good for society. We’re taking a community-first approach with Llama 3, and starting today, these models are available on the leading cloud, hosting, and hardware platforms with many more to come.

Try Meta Llama 3 today

We’ve integrated our latest models into Meta AI, which we believe is the world’s leading AI assistant. It’s now built with Llama 3 technology and it’s available in more countries across our apps.

You can use Meta AI on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the web to get things done, learn, create, and connect with the things that matter to you. You can read more about the Meta AI experience here .

Visit the Llama 3 website to download the models and reference the Getting Started Guide for the latest list of all available platforms.

You’ll also soon be able to test multimodal Meta AI on our Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

As always, we look forward to seeing all the amazing products and experiences you will build with Meta Llama 3.

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Including Pictures in a Research Paper: Pros & Cons

The inclusion of visual elements such as images, diagrams, and graphs can be a powerful tool in effectively communicating the main points of a research paper. In this article, we discuss both the potential benefits and drawbacks to consider when deciding whether or not to include pictures within one’s research paper. Through an examination of the evidence that exists on this topic, along with highlighting perspectives from experts in various fields, we will provide readers with pertinent information for making decisions about using visuals as part of their written work.

I. Introduction

Ii. the benefits of including pictures in a research paper, iii. factors to consider when inserting an image into a research paper, iv. negative aspects of images in research papers, v. strategies for finding appropriate and legitimate sources for pictures used within academic writing, vi. techniques for citing images correctly in mla formatting style, vii conclusion.

When embarking on any academic journey, it’s important to consider the importance of an introduction . Introductions not only offer a way for readers to grasp the main idea of a paper quickly and easily, but they also provide an opportunity for authors to draw in their audience through engaging writing.

Including images is one way that research papers can effectively engage readers. Adding visuals can help break up long passages or enhance explanations of key concepts throughout a text. For example, if discussing complicated processes related to biology or chemistry, diagrams may be included within the body of work as visual aids which explain more complex information.

• Pictures : adding relevant imagery can be extremely helpful when attempting to demonstrate difficult topics.

A picture is worth a thousand words. This saying applies to research papers as well, which can be greatly enhanced by incorporating the right visuals. There are several benefits of including pictures in a research paper.

• Gives Your Paper Depth: Incorporating relevant photos and diagrams into your paper allows you to provide more detail about the topic than just words alone could accomplish. Pictures can help break up long sections of text, adding visual interest for readers who may not have time or energy to devote solely to reading your entire piece. Plus, since most humans process images faster than they do language-based content, it’s likely that your audience will gain a better understanding of what you’re trying to convey with an image instead.
• Can Enhance Understanding: The addition of meaningful images alongside scientific data helps readers comprehend complex topics more quickly and easily without having any prior knowledge on those subjects; this makes them particularly helpful when discussing difficult concepts like thermodynamics or quantum mechanics.

When incorporating an image into a research paper, there are several factors to consider. First , one must determine if the chosen image is relevant to the argument being made in the paper. For example, inserting a photograph of an historic building alongside evidence about its past inhabitants will add clarity and visual interest to this discussion. Moreover, readers can draw further connections between ideas or learn more about certain topics simply by viewing associated images.

Second , it is important that any visuals used within a research paper are properly cited according to style guidelines established by the academic institution or journal publishing outlet – plagiarism rules still apply! This ensures proper attribution for artistic work included in your writing and prevents readers from misinterpreting where source material has come from.

• Can a research paper have pictures? Absolutely – as long as they have been sourced responsibly.

Lastly, always ensure that images complement rather than distract from text; while some visuals may be striking on their own, too many colorful diagrams or photographs could create confusion around main points being conveyed in written form. Remember: it’s not enough just to include an image—it should also provide clear value when paired with related content throughout your document.

One of the key considerations when producing a research paper is the use of images. While photographs and illustrations can add value to written content, it’s important that researchers understand both the positive and negative implications they may bring.

• Lack of Detail

In many cases, photos used in research papers provide an overall idea or concept but don’t offer much detail. It’s possible that using additional figures would be beneficial for illustrating certain aspects not fully understood from just one image. In other words, if you’re aiming to explain a complicated concept, relying solely on pictures could cause readers to misinterpret your intentions – something which should be avoided at all costs!

• Can You Include Pictures?

When writing up research papers with any kind of visual aid such as diagrams or charts – there are two main options available: including them within the text body itself or linking out to external sources like websites hosting these resources online. The former requires more effort due to formatting requirements; while links take users away from reading material so must only be used where appropriate. Despite this though, providing visuals still has its place within academic literature; giving readers greater understanding into complex topics being discussed throughout by complementing theoretical ideas with tangible evidence presented via imaging tools.

Using Online Databases In the digital age, much of our research material is found on online databases. While these are incredibly useful for finding accurate and legitimate information from reliable sources, they can also be used to locate appropriate images. Many academic journals and other publications provide access to an array of photographs or diagrams which support their text. When searching through any online database, it’s important to ensure that whatever photos you use are permitted for educational purposes; often websites will contain a disclaimer specifying what usage rights have been granted.

Reputable Publishers & Digital Image Banks Another way of obtaining pictures related to your topic is by accessing reputable publishers’ collections or using digital image banks such as Getty Images and Unsplash which offer free downloads (under certain conditions). Using books specifically written about the subject matter may help too – some authors include illustrations in their writing so they could act as great visual aids when discussing a particular issue within your paper! Additionally, can a research paper have pictures? Yes – providing each photo is appropriately cited according to acceptable academic referencing standards alongside being labeled correctly with captions describing its context in relation to the given text.

Correctly Citing Images

Citations are a critical part of all academic writing, and it is essential to know how to cite an image correctly in MLA format. In the same way that you would include information from a book or journal article, citing images provides credit for visual sources so readers can track down the originals.

• Images taken from websites require both copyright and permission statements when published online. Include links with each image citation as well as any relevant source details such as author name or publisher.
• Image files like photos, illustrations and charts should be labeled with captions that identify them as figures along with titles or descriptions.

In this paper, we explored the potential of using pictures in research. To summarize:

• Pictures can be valuable elements to a successful research study.
• Images used should have educational value and not solely decorative use.

When considering images for inclusion in one’s work, it is important to carefully consider their impact on the message being delivered. When included thoughtfully they can contribute significantly by conveying an idea with more clarity than text alone ever could. But when selected poorly or abused too frequently, they may detract from a reader’s overall understanding and experience of your work – ultimately damaging its effectiveness as persuasive evidence.

The inclusion of visual elements in a research paper can often times be beneficial to its content. Through the integration of pictures, graphs and diagrams, authors are able to more effectively communicate their ideas while also providing readers with additional insight into the topic at hand. However, it is important for researchers to understand both the pros and cons associated with incorporating visuals into their work so that they may make an informed decision regarding how best to utilize them within their own papers. In this way, not only does including images add value from a narrative perspective but also helps elevate overall scholarship standards by ensuring sound conclusions are drawn based on tangible evidence whenever possible.

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Venus exploration remains key to understanding exo-earths, says paper.

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NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 5: In this handout image provided by NASA, Liz Heller and Andriel Mesznik watch ... [+] the transit of Venus on June 5, 2012 in New York, New York. The Transit of Venus involves the planet Venus crossing in front of the sun. The next pair of events will not happen again until the year 2117 and 2125. (Photo by Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images)

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, our sister planet Venus remains a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Remarkably similar in size, mass, and bulk makeup, today, Earth and Venus couldn't be more different. Earth is an ecological utopia while Venus is a poster child for planetary desolation.

The conventional view is that Venus simply formed too close to our evolving yellow dwarf star to maintain liquid water at its surface. But in the last few decades, that view has come to be seen as simplistic. That’s because this explanation fails to adequately answer why Venus came to have surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and atmospheric surface pressures ninety times that of Earth.

Even so, the authors of a new paper being published today in the journal Nature Astronomy argue that Venus remains crucial to understanding earth-mass and earth-like planets circling other stars.

Venus represents an astrobiological cautionary tale. That’s because observations of terrestrial mass exoplanets that —- at first glance —- would appear to be habitable may simply be producing an abundance of abiotic oxygen. That is, oxygen that has nothing to do with life on the planets’ surfaces.

Venus. The planet Venus, the second planet from the Sun, has the longest rotation period (243 days) ... [+] of any planet in the Solar System. It orbits the Sun every 224.7 Earth days, making a Venusian year shorter than an Earth year. Artist NASA. (Photo by Heritage Space/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

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In the late 1970s, NASA’s Pioneer Venus orbiter mission detected evidence for the catastrophic outgassing of an ocean’s worth of water. The abiotic oxygen produced during this outgassing would have been readily visible to alien astronomers if they were looking our way. We can only speculate whether some other intelligent civilization at the time might have misinterpreted our own Venus as being habitable due to this putative abundance of abiotic oxygen.

Such scenarios only illustrate how difficult it is going to be to say with any certainty that a given exoplanet may harbor life.

Venus As Research Lab

We are extremely lucky to have Venus right next door; it's likely the only other large rocky world we will ever get to, Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, and the paper’s co-author, told me via email. Earth-size worlds in other planetary systems are light years away; we have no foreseeable means of reaching them, says Byrne.

In order to really understand how you obtain conditions which are suitable for life to form in the first place, you really need to understand the past the present and future of planets and how they evolve with time, Stephen Kane, the paper’s lead author and a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California, Riverside, told me via phone. That's why we argue that Venus is really the key to that because it shows an extremely different evolution from Earth, he says.

In contrast to Earth, Venus has a rotational period of 243 days. Its atmosphere is almost entirely Carbon Dioxide CO2 (with a small amount of nitrogen and trace abundances of other gases) such as sulfur dioxide, argon and water vapor, the authors write. Moreover, the planet is cloaked in a global layer of sulfuric acid clouds, they note.

Byrne points out that although Venus and Earth formed in the same manner as the other rocky planets in our solar system, it’s still a puzzle as to why they took such divergent evolutionary paths.

If you move a planet too close to the star, then it's going to lose the primary atmosphere that it formed with and it's going to create a secondary atmosphere, says Kane. But if it's too close to the star, the planet will also lose its secondary atmosphere, he says.

Illustration of NASA's Pioneer Venus Orbiter mission.

Kane says that one of the most interesting things about Earth is that it has had surface liquid water for about 4 billion years. This means that Earth has had to maintain a very narrow temperature range, which he calls “extraordinary.”

As For A Solar System Without A Venus Analog?

If we did not have Venus, you can only imagine what we would be inferring about the Earth size planet population that we're currently discovering around other stars, says Kane. That’s because our models would never predict Venus, he says.

Earth and Venus are the same size and the same mass, but on a planetary scale everything else about Venus is different, says Kane. The magnetic field is different, the rotation rate is different, and Venus doesn't have a moon, so its axial tilt is different, he says.

Kane is also puzzled by Venus’ slow rotation rate and how it’s changed over time.

With Venus, we now think that the atmosphere itself has slowed the planet down, says Kane. It’s been assumed that Venus always was a slow rotator, but we don't know that, he says. And we don't fully understand the effect that the change in Venus' rotation rate has had on its climate evolution, says Kane.

Is there hope of ever understanding our sister planet?

For a start, a fleet of spacecraft will investigate Venus over the next decade, says the European Space Agency. They include ESA’s Envision mission, NASA’s VERITAS orbiter and DAVINCI probe, and India’s Shukrayaan orbiter.

These upcoming missions represent the best next step in making Venus a research priority.

As we discover more and more Earth- size worlds orbiting other stars we'll need to figure out how to distinguish those that are like Venus from those that are like Earth, says Byrne. If it's solely based on distance to the host star, then distinguishing that will be straightforward, he says. But if it's more complicated, and Earth-like worlds can form and be stable closer in to their parent stars, then we're going to have to understand why Venus and Earth turned out so differently, Byrne notes.

But Was Venus Ever Earth-Like?

Whether the answer is yes or no, figuring out this mystery is going to be a big deal, says Byrne.

And it will help us better understand our own planet.

Figuring out when, why, and how Venus ended up different to Earth will tell us how Earth has managed to stay habitable for almost its entire lifetime, says Byrne.

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The speed of computing innovation is faster than ever. Research in human-computer interaction is part of this innovation and remains paramount to shaping our future technology frontier. Meet the Georgia Tech experts who are charting a path forward. #CHI2024

The ACM Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems has remained the destination for global experts in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research for more than 30 years. Georgia Tech has been a Top 10 contributor to the technical program for well over a decade. Discover the people who are leading HCI research in the era of artificial intelligence.

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Georgia Tech’s 33 papers in the technical program represent 3 percent of conference papers. Our experts are also part of contributions to Alt Chi, Case Studies, Interactivity, Journals, Late-Breaking Work, Panels, Special Interest Groups, and Workshops.

Search for people and organizations in the chart below. The first column shows Georgia Tech-led teams. Each row is an entire team, with the label showing the first author’s name. Explore more now.

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Observer Effect in Social Media Use

Koustuv Saha, Pranshu Gupta, Gloria Mark, Emre Kiciman, Munmun De Choudhury

Farsight: Fostering Responsible AI Awareness During AI Application Prototyping

Zijie Wang, Chinmay Kulkarni, Lauren Wilcox, Michael Terry, Michael Madaio

Featured Research

DeepSee — Visualization System for Analyzing Oceanographic Data

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Farsight is a New Tool that Teaches Responsible AI Practices for Large Language Models

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What the data says about crime in the U.S.

A growing share of Americans say reducing crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress to address this year. Around six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) hold that view today, up from 47% at the beginning of Joe Biden’s presidency in 2021.

We conducted this analysis to learn more about U.S. crime patterns and how those patterns have changed over time.

The analysis relies on statistics published by the FBI, which we accessed through the Crime Data Explorer , and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which we accessed through the  National Crime Victimization Survey data analysis tool .

To measure public attitudes about crime in the U.S., we relied on survey data from Pew Research Center and Gallup.

Additional details about each data source, including survey methodologies, are available by following the links in the text of this analysis.

With the issue likely to come up in this year’s presidential election, here’s what we know about crime in the United States, based on the latest available data from the federal government and other sources.

How much crime is there in the U.S.?

It’s difficult to say for certain. The  two primary sources of government crime statistics  – the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) – paint an incomplete picture.

The FBI publishes  annual data  on crimes that have been reported to law enforcement, but not crimes that haven’t been reported. Historically, the FBI has also only published statistics about a handful of specific violent and property crimes, but not many other types of crime, such as drug crime. And while the FBI’s data is based on information from thousands of federal, state, county, city and other police departments, not all law enforcement agencies participate every year. In 2022, the most recent full year with available statistics, the FBI received data from 83% of participating agencies .

BJS, for its part, tracks crime by fielding a  large annual survey of Americans ages 12 and older and asking them whether they were the victim of certain types of crime in the past six months. One advantage of this approach is that it captures both reported and unreported crimes. But the BJS survey has limitations of its own. Like the FBI, it focuses mainly on a handful of violent and property crimes. And since the BJS data is based on after-the-fact interviews with crime victims, it cannot provide information about one especially high-profile type of offense: murder.

All those caveats aside, looking at the FBI and BJS statistics side-by-side  does  give researchers a good picture of U.S. violent and property crime rates and how they have changed over time. In addition, the FBI is transitioning to a new data collection system – known as the National Incident-Based Reporting System – that eventually will provide national information on a much larger set of crimes , as well as details such as the time and place they occur and the types of weapons involved, if applicable.

Which kinds of crime are most and least common?

Property crime in the U.S. is much more common than violent crime. In 2022, the FBI reported a total of 1,954.4 property crimes per 100,000 people, compared with 380.7 violent crimes per 100,000 people.  

By far the most common form of property crime in 2022 was larceny/theft, followed by motor vehicle theft and burglary. Among violent crimes, aggravated assault was the most common offense, followed by robbery, rape, and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter.

BJS tracks a slightly different set of offenses from the FBI, but it finds the same overall patterns, with theft the most common form of property crime in 2022 and assault the most common form of violent crime.

How have crime rates in the U.S. changed over time?

Both the FBI and BJS data show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s, when crime spiked across much of the nation.

Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-74%), aggravated assault (-39%) and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (-34%). It’s not possible to calculate the change in the rape rate during this period because the FBI  revised its definition of the offense in 2013 .

The FBI data also shows a 59% reduction in the U.S. property crime rate between 1993 and 2022, with big declines in the rates of burglary (-75%), larceny/theft (-54%) and motor vehicle theft (-53%).

Using the BJS statistics, the declines in the violent and property crime rates are even steeper than those captured in the FBI data. Per BJS, the U.S. violent and property crime rates each fell 71% between 1993 and 2022.

While crime rates have fallen sharply over the long term, the decline hasn’t always been steady. There have been notable increases in certain kinds of crime in some years, including recently.

In 2020, for example, the U.S. murder rate saw its largest single-year increase on record – and by 2022, it remained considerably higher than before the coronavirus pandemic. Preliminary data for 2023, however, suggests that the murder rate fell substantially last year .

How do Americans perceive crime in their country?

Americans tend to believe crime is up, even when official data shows it is down.

In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993 , at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period.

While perceptions of rising crime at the national level are common, fewer Americans believe crime is up in their own communities. In every Gallup crime survey since the 1990s, Americans have been much less likely to say crime is up in their area than to say the same about crime nationally.

Public attitudes about crime differ widely by Americans’ party affiliation, race and ethnicity, and other factors . For example, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are much more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to say reducing crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress this year (68% vs. 47%), according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

How does crime in the U.S. differ by demographic characteristics?

Some groups of Americans are more likely than others to be victims of crime. In the  2022 BJS survey , for example, younger people and those with lower incomes were far more likely to report being the victim of a violent crime than older and higher-income people.

There were no major differences in violent crime victimization rates between male and female respondents or between those who identified as White, Black or Hispanic. But the victimization rate among Asian Americans (a category that includes Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders) was substantially lower than among other racial and ethnic groups.

The same BJS survey asks victims about the demographic characteristics of the offenders in the incidents they experienced.

In 2022, those who are male, younger people and those who are Black accounted for considerably larger shares of perceived offenders in violent incidents than their respective shares of the U.S. population. Men, for instance, accounted for 79% of perceived offenders in violent incidents, compared with 49% of the nation’s 12-and-older population that year. Black Americans accounted for 25% of perceived offenders in violent incidents, about twice their share of the 12-and-older population (12%).

As with all surveys, however, there are several potential sources of error, including the possibility that crime victims’ perceptions about offenders are incorrect.

How does crime in the U.S. differ geographically?

There are big geographic differences in violent and property crime rates.

For example, in 2022, there were more than 700 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in New Mexico and Alaska. That compares with fewer than 200 per 100,000 people in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine, according to the FBI.

The FBI notes that various factors might influence an area’s crime rate, including its population density and economic conditions.

What percentage of crimes are reported to police? What percentage are solved?

Most violent and property crimes in the U.S. are not reported to police, and most of the crimes that  are  reported are not solved.

In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.”

Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile,  are not solved , at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate . That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention.

Which crimes are most likely to be reported to police? Which are most likely to be solved?

Around eight-in-ten motor vehicle thefts (80.9%) were reported to police in 2022, making them by far the most commonly reported property crime tracked by BJS. Household burglaries and trespassing offenses were reported to police at much lower rates (44.9% and 41.2%, respectively), while personal theft/larceny and other types of theft were only reported around a quarter of the time.

Among violent crimes – excluding homicide, which BJS doesn’t track – robbery was the most likely to be reported to law enforcement in 2022 (64.0%). It was followed by aggravated assault (49.9%), simple assault (36.8%) and rape/sexual assault (21.4%).

The list of crimes  cleared  by police in 2022 looks different from the list of crimes reported. Law enforcement officers were generally much more likely to solve violent crimes than property crimes, according to the FBI.

The most frequently solved violent crime tends to be homicide. Police cleared around half of murders and nonnegligent manslaughters (52.3%) in 2022. The clearance rates were lower for aggravated assault (41.4%), rape (26.1%) and robbery (23.2%).

When it comes to property crime, law enforcement agencies cleared 13.0% of burglaries, 12.4% of larcenies/thefts and 9.3% of motor vehicle thefts in 2022.

Are police solving more or fewer crimes than they used to?

Nationwide clearance rates for both violent and property crime are at their lowest levels since at least 1993, the FBI data shows.

Police cleared a little over a third (36.7%) of the violent crimes that came to their attention in 2022, down from nearly half (48.1%) as recently as 2013. During the same period, there were decreases for each of the four types of violent crime the FBI tracks:

• Police cleared 52.3% of reported murders and nonnegligent homicides in 2022, down from 64.1% in 2013.
• They cleared 41.4% of aggravated assaults, down from 57.7%.
• They cleared 26.1% of rapes, down from 40.6%.
• They cleared 23.2% of robberies, down from 29.4%.

The pattern is less pronounced for property crime. Overall, law enforcement agencies cleared 12.1% of reported property crimes in 2022, down from 19.7% in 2013. The clearance rate for burglary didn’t change much, but it fell for larceny/theft (to 12.4% in 2022 from 22.4% in 2013) and motor vehicle theft (to 9.3% from 14.2%).

Note: This is an update of a post originally published on Nov. 20, 2020.

• Criminal Justice

John Gramlich is an associate director at Pew Research Center

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