the-canonical-figure

# Draw the field's standard figure before your own Every field has one or two figures a paper of that kind is expected to contain. A reader looks for them first, and their absence is read as the analysis not having been done — even when the same information is present somewhere else, in a table, in prose, or inside a figure you designed yourself. Some examples of the shape, not a checklist: - Bayesian parameter inference is expected to show the joint posterior — a corner or triangle plot over the parameters — not only marginal summaries or a table of medians and intervals. - An iterative optimiser is expected to show objective against iteration, log scale, your method and the baseline on the same axes. - Anything trained is expected to show the learning curves: training and validation loss against epoch, on the same panel, so overfitting is visible. - A spatial field is expected to be shown as a map, per epoch or lead time, beside the reference field — not summarised into one error number. - A classifier is expected to show the curve its threshold moves along, not one operating point. ## Why your own figure does not substitute You will usually find something more interesting than the standard plot, and it is right to show it. But an original figure answers a question the reader did not ask yet. The standard one answers "did the thing work, in the way this field checks that". Publish both, standard first. ## The trace has to be written down while it exists A...