Show me the image: a systematic analysis on how results are represented in publications from different fields of biomedical and biological research

Figures are essential to convey the main results of scientific articles. Different biomedical research fields have different methodologies and therefore different forms of data representation. To understand whether there are distinct patterns of data representation, we analyzed how results are displayed in scientific publications from six fields: Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Clinical Sciences, Oncology and Carcinogenesis, Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Zoology. Our results show that Graphics were the most frequent type of representation, followed by Schemes and diagrams. Microscopy was the third most used type of image in most fields, except in Pharmacology and Pharmaceutical Sciences, where Molecules and chemical reactions were the third most frequent. Interestingly, each research field has a characteristic pattern of image. We further classified the image types in primary or secondary data, according to the level of human interference in its construction. Each field has a particular proportion of primary and secondary images. We also analyzed the frequency of words and observed a remarkable vocabulary difference between fields. The most frequent word of each field nicely correlates with the unique type of figures used. Specific fields might gain more visibility for their data by using diverse approaches in image representation.