Nature告诉你，一副好的论文插图有多重要！

　　"If you've got a story you want to get out there and you've got a really good image, it will fly a lot farther than just words."

　　本文译自Nature2016, 534, 285-287.

　　

　　科学插画家Victor Leshyk从研究者的素描（左）出发，创作了一幅Gilboa化石森林的概念图作为Nature的封面（右）

　　阅读以下译文时请自动开启天津快板或hip-hop模式

　　byJYOTI MADHUSOODANAN

　　On canvas, a 390-million-year-old forest springs to life. Massive tree trunks jut into a sunlit clearing from a crowded forest floor. Stubby green branches battle with frilly leaf-like filaments to touch the pink-tinged sky. Palaeobotanist Chris Berry had worked for years with samples from the Gilboa Fossil Forest in New York, but had never before seen what the living forest might have looked like so many millennia ago.

　　译文：

　　3.9亿年前的森林充满了生机

　　巨大的树干粉色的天空

　　卷曲着远古的新奇

　　Gilboa化石森林就是这里

　　工作多年的古生物学家Chris Berry说

　　图里画的是我这辈子都没见过的奇迹

　　Dubbed ‘Lost Worlds’, the digital oil painting was created by Victor Leshyk to accompany a 2012 research paper in Nature by Berry and his colleagues (W. E. Stein et al. Nature 483, 78–81; 2012). It was commissioned to appear on the cover of the journal and Berry features it in his talks today, especially those for lay audiences.

　　译文：

　　这幅“失落的世界”由Victor Leshyk创作

　　2012年第483期Nature封面因此光芒四射

　　Berry和他的同事是论文的作者

　　后来他们在报告中经常放出这幅图

　　简直是走哪“吹”哪，一个都不放过

　　It was Berry's first experience in teaming up with a scientific illustrator, and Leshyk's work exceeded his expectations. “It was very prestigious for us to have it on the cover, and the image proved very good for engagement and outreach,” he says. Berry, who is based at the University of Cardiff, UK, has collaborated with artists twice since then, for press releases and museum exhibitions that involve his research, and he is discussing a second project with Leshyk. “If you've got a story you want to get out there and you've got a really good image,” he says, “it will fly a lot farther than just words.”

　　译文：

　　这是Berry第一次和插画家合作

　　而现在这幅封面化身一张张名片飘过

　　Berry无疑对此上瘾了

　　现在他又找上了Leshyk

　　“兄弟，帮我的研究整个效果图呗！价格都好说~”

　　The use of striking images to accompany manuscripts and outreach efforts is growing as more journal publishers are requiring graphical abstracts - depictions of a paper's main thrust or concept - to accompany studies. These commissioned illustrations differ from the everyday photograph, sketch or overview figure that usually accompanies research manuscripts or talks. They get to the core of concepts; they may also depict unobservable phenomena, ranging from subatomic particles to what extinct life forms might have looked like. Although working on such images with an illustrator might seem like a lot of extra toil, and paying for their services extravagant, the benefits of skilled artistic presentation can be manifold.

　　译文：

　　越来越多的期刊出版商都吃这一套

　　封面图和TOC开始C位出道

　　它们不同于日常论文中的图表

　　从亚原子状态到灭绝的恐龙

　　都能做到惟妙惟肖

　　一幅封面三千虽说不算少

　　但它带来的好处你根本想不到

　　

　　（非本文图片）

　　Visually stunning representations that result from collaborations between scientists and artists can grab millions of online views, and attract a much wider audience than a non-illustrated paper, both of which are particularly useful for researchers whose grant applications or funding proposals require them to show a public-outreach component. They are also more likely to be written about and shared digitally, helping to raise the visibility of a scientist's work, attract more students to a lab, boost career standing and improve chances of garnering funding. They can even inspire new experiments or reveal gaps in knowledge.

　　译文：

　　这是科学家和艺术家的合作

　　只为了吸引更多的读者

　　有了能抓住眼球的效果

　　根本不惧经费申请或是基金proposal

　　一幅完美的科学插图简直就是流量担当

　　朋友圈里人们争相点赞和分享

　　名声有了，学生多了，经费不用愁了

　　甚至还能激发新的想象

　　Even when photographs or images already exist, hand-rendered or digital illustrations and 3D animations can clarify and enhance the technical details of a key data point or finding — exactly how proteins latch onto the surface of DNA, for example, or the shape of butterfly larvae that are usually hidden in leaf litter. Scientists who want to examine their research question or findings more fully, to 'see' their data or to provide a pictorial boost to their manuscript should consider teaming up with an illustrator. Scientific artists can also help to create artwork for a project's website, or explain hard-to-grasp concepts with short videos.

　　译文：

　　无论数码照片还是电镜图像

　　感觉还是无法诠释我的中心思想

　　蛋白是如何精确地附着在DNA上？

　　隐藏在叶屑中的蝴蝶幼虫又长什么样？

　　如果科学家想有更多收获

　　他应该找个插画家合作

　　图像和短视频都是艺术创作

　　让别人看了只能独自寂寞

　　Learning point

　　Most such collaborations begin when researchers are writing a paper, but it can be helpful to start even earlier (see 'Turn science into art'). Discussing with an artist how best to depict a mechanism or process — what to include and exclude, how molecules, stars or fossils should be positioned relative to one another — can help researchers to hone their hypothesis, reveal points of disagreement between authors and even identify holes in understanding.

　　译文：

　　别等写文章了才把插画家来找

　　想要好的图像一定要趁早

　　机理过程描述充满了问号

　　分子、星星和化石，什么最重要

　　管他现在是否云雾缭绕

　　新的想法迟早会来到

　　Box 1: Turn science into art

　　Here are some tips for getting the most out of the experience of creating art for science.

　　Establish a working relationship with an illustrator long before you will need her or him — when you start writing a review article, for example, or when pursuing outreach projects for schools or museums.

　　Seek out illustrators who have expertise in areas related to your research and look through their portfolios for artistic styles that you like. Scientists typically find artists through referrals from colleagues or through online searches for illustrators in their geographic area or field of study. The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators in Washington DC maintains a list of contacts, and many illustrators 电影先生 share their own work on Twitter under #sciart.

　　Clearly establish the data points that need to be in the art from the outset, so that the end product is accurate. But allow the artist to maximize the visual impact of their illustration.

　　Be bold with ideas. One image isn't the definitive description of a scientific theory, so it's fine if an image includes some ambiguity about unknowns or hypotheses as long as it's done with sufficient context.

　　Seek illustrators who ask questions. You should aim to find an artist who engages with your work.

　　Chemist Lauren Benz of the University of San Diego, California, found that talking with an illustrator helped her to uncover important issues that she had not considered when she started drafting her review article about the applications of membranes made from polymers and other materials. She had commissioned freelance artist Mary O'Reilly, who earned her PhD in biological chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, to help illustrate how these membranes work at the molecular level. O'Reilly asked whether she should depict molecules filtering through a particular spot in the membrane, and Benz and her collaborators realized that they didn't know exactly where the filtering happened.

　　译文：

　　去找插画家吧，TA们很有想法

　　San Diego大学的Lauren Benz忍不住要夸

　　她想找人帮忙画个过滤的膜材料

　　找来找去找到了自由职业的玛丽·奥

　　玛丽·奥，毕业于MIT生物化学系

　　Benz发现和她交谈感觉很奇妙

　　玛丽·奥问道：分子是否通过膜上某个特定的点被过滤掉？

　　Benz和她的合作者这才反应过来

　　TMD这点我们根本都没想到！

　　“It made me question some assumptions I had about the filtration mechanism, and going back and forth with Mary helped us come up with some research questions we could ask going forward,” she says. She is now planning experiments to tackle them.

　　译文：

　　Benz觉得玛丽·奥简直呱呱叫

　　跟她多多来回走动变得很重要

　　她们正在重新设计实验证明这一点

　　如果早点认识Mary该有多么好

　　Scientific illustration can encapsulate information that is not easily or often conveyed by text, line drawings or simple graphics. But it can also be used when direct imagery such as photographs are impractical or even impossible. Biologist Jessica Linton, who works with the Canadian consulting firm Natural Resource Solutions in Waterloo, was working on a recovery strategy for the endangered mottled duskywing butterfly (Erynnis martialis) when she realized that there were no available images of the creature's microscopic eggs and pupae, which tend to be buried in soil under leaf litter, and are extremely difficult to photograph.

　　译文：

　　简单的文字图表也许难以表达

　　照片和假想有时也无法说话

　　Scientific Illustration能做些什么

　　让我们来问问生物学家Jessica

　　Jessica想挽救一种濒临灭绝的蝴蝶

　　她要为这可怜的物种制定恢复策略

　　但是蝴蝶的卵和蛹都埋在土里

　　而且上面覆盖着厚厚的落叶

　　Armed with scientific descriptions, she turned to illustrator Emily Damstra, whom she had met through a local butterfly enthusiasts' group. Damstra's illustrations — which are now included in the Ontario government's policy document outlining the recovery strategy — received enthusiastic appreciation from butterfly researchers and ecologists.

　　译文：

　　通过蝴蝶爱好者小组

　　Jessica认识了Emily Damstra

　　Damstra刚好是个插画家

　　根据自己的描述，Damstra来绘制插图

　　这些插图如今列入政府政策文件

　　还有什么比这更加让人欢欣鼓舞

　　For those who work at the molecular level, illustrations and videos often provide the first visualization of materials or concepts that the researchers might have worked on for years — and it can be a revelation. As a graduate student, Janet Iwasa often found herself and her lab mates resorting to stick-figure drawings or waving their hands around to depict the movements of the protein they were studying: kinesin, which scuttles along skeletal filaments inside cells. “Scientific information was often lost,” she says. “The first time I really understood how kinesin worked was when my principal investigator hired an animator to illustrate it.” (In part because of her frustration over this, she left bench research after completing a postdoc and now works on molecular visualization in her post at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.)

　　译文：

　　对分子水平的研究者来说

　　生动莫过于一张分子图像或一段动画

　　可怜工作多年才第一次发现

　　还可以实现研究概念的科学可视化

　　有个研究Kinesin的研究生名叫Iwasa

　　跟人解释蛋白运动全靠写写画画

　　有时还会手舞足蹈总之想尽办法

　　直到有一天

　　首席研究员雇了个动画师来解释它

　　Iwasa这才觉得以前自己就是二傻

　　

　　Molecular visualizations of structures such as HIV can point researchers to new avenues of investigation.

　　These depictions can offer surprising perspectives. “Sometimes, you need an image to tell the story effectively,” says visual science communicator Kate Patterson of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia. “They can also be question-generating, as scientists start to think about what they're seeing in a new way.” When Patterson showed some researchers her animation of how DNA can be modified at the chemical level, a lively discussion ensued about how the process. Thanks to the animation, the group began to consider the physical arrangements of molecules inside the nucleus, rather than just the chemistry or enzymes involved.

　　译文：

　　相比之下澳大利亚的Kate就要聪明得多

　　她的工作在悉尼Garvan医学研究所

　　当她向人展示DNA在化学水平上如何被修饰

　　一段动画就完美解释了所有的故事

　　反响是强烈的，讨论是热烈的

　　研究小组已经不满足于化学和酶

　　他们的目光已被深深勾进了细胞核

　　核里的分子们，你们是怎么排列的？

　　Working with illustrators can also help scientists to hone their own skills at presenting data in images. Cell biologist Matt Thomson at the University of California, San Francisco, says that collaborating with science illustrator Jessica Huppi for his study on embryonic cells taught him to prune less-relevant details for better impact, and that colour and layout can often convey information more effectively than text labels.

　　译文：

　　跟插画家合作还有一个好处

　　可以帮助科学家更好地呈现数据

　　细胞生物学家Matt Thomson在研究胚胎细胞

　　如何处理细胞图像才会效果最好

　　一个叫Huppi的科学插画家深谙此道

　　他能帮你将无关干扰信息减到最小

　　The paper showed that genes in growing embryonic cells can be controlled by light (C. Sokolik et al. Cell Syst. 1, 117–129; 2015), and Huppi's illustrations helped him to realize that there were many ways of conveying information visually. Seeing how Huppi used effects such as colours, shapes and relative sizes has helped him to represent data effectively in subsequent work, he says. “Working with an illustrator gives you a chance to learn how to approach this type of process of thinking visually — how you convey time in a drawing, or how you can convey cause and effect.”

　　译文：

　　Huppi的武器并非只有简单的颜色、形状和相对大小

　　如何有效地表示数据真的很重要

　　和一位插画家合作让你有机会学习视觉的思考

　　如何表达时间？如何表达逻辑？

　　相信我，他们真的有一套

　　Conceptual approach

　　Many researchers who have worked with illustrators say that they expect to do so again. But they note that the time needed to produce good artwork can add weeks to preparing a paper, and the expense of hiring a professional ranges from a few hundred dollars to thousands. This kind of time and money is not always defensible. Benz says that illustrations are useful for portraying general ideas or concepts, but that simple data can often be conveyed clearly in charts and graphs. Thomson cautions against enlisting professional help just to make a paper more decorative. Scientists who want to save money and create their own art and figures can use Microsoft Excel, molecular-visualization software and tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, but those without artistic training may find they need to invest time in learning how to use the programs.

　　译文：

　　许多跟插画师合作过的人会无法自拔

　　一份论文因此推迟一周

　　多花几百到几千美元也不在话下

　　但如果只是为了装饰纸张

　　我只能说你是有钱没地儿花

　　很多基础的软件可以实现科学可视化

　　比如Adobe Photoshop和Illustrator

　　但是那些没有受过艺术训练的科学家

　　怎么会有时间来学习它

　　But they should consider more than just the money when making that choice. Hiring an illustrator saved Benz's two graduate-student co-authors from a huge time sink. “For them to not have to spend hours on learning how to draw a figure was hugely helpful,” she says. “There was a direct impact on our work.”

　　译文：

　　话说回来聘请专业人士考虑的不仅是钱

　　研究人员最最宝贵的就是时间

　　有人代劳示意图表达真的是种解脱

　　因为整理论文和数据已经够折磨

　　And although the right software can help a researcher to produce simple figures and visualize single molecules, that will not always result in a professional-style animation or illustration. Researchers who are not artists tend to lack the sense of design and aesthetics that are a keystones of fabulous artwork. “Where illustrators come in is in their knowledge of colour theory, using composition to guide someone's eye around a page or image in the right order,” says O'Reilly. “Or drawing their eye to the centre of interest.”

　　译文：

　　绘图软件的学习是条漫漫长路

　　不是谁都能做出专业风格的动画或插图

　　如果研究人员缺乏设计感，不懂美学和艺术

　　那就等于失去了创作的基础

　　色彩的运用，正确的构图

　　插画家能引导视觉，在画面中起舞

　　When Berry published a paper about a different fossil forest, his institution's press office asked him for images. With no illustrator accessible at the time, he sketched out trees by hand and sent his line drawings to a colleague who helped to add colour. The image is now widely used on websites, news stories and in research presentations, Berry says. Although his drawing was much simpler than Leshyk's, the process still took him nearly two weeks. “It was a lot of fun,” he says. “But I'm not sure I could do it again. That was the first time I tried to draw a whole forest to a standard good enough to let other people look at.” The experience underscored to him how much effort — and talent — is required for illustration. Since then, he has chosen to seek professional help when he needs artwork.

　　译文：

　　Berry曾经发表了一篇关于不同化石森林的论文

　　出版办公室要求他提供图片

　　他画好了线条，同事帮忙上了色调

　　虽然和Leshyk的作品不能比

　　但两周时间就这么没了

　　Yet the value of professional scientific illustration has been tough to quantify or explain to many. Few, if any, studies have examined its impact on a manuscript, presentation or grant proposal. But many researchers vow that illustrated manuscripts get better results. “Anecdotally, people say you get more citations, or reviewers are happier with a paper, if you have good figures,” Patterson says. “Or if you have a cover image, it'll get more attention. But the actual data behind that are lacking.”

　　译文：

　　专业插图的价值目前难以得到科学的评估

　　但研究人员都认为有图胜过无

　　“吸引人的图片能得到更多的引用”

　　“封面图片能获得更广泛的关注”

　　Patterson说这背后缺乏实际的数据

　　我相信只要有人去研究这事儿绝对一清二楚

　　Still, researchers agree that whether through a simple graphic or a 3D animation, the visual communication of science is growing increasingly important. Some researchers think that professionally made figures can ease a manuscript's path through peer review. Although this is tough to verify, geneticist Deborah Kurrasch of the University of Calgary in Canada says that she has opted to work with illustrators many times before submitting a paper. And when she's acting as a reviewer, she adds, well-made figures make it easier to read and understand the data.

　　译文：

　　无论是简单插图还是3D动画的来到

　　研究人员一致认为科学的视觉交流越来越重要

　　如果阅读和理解数据变得更加容易

　　审稿人都会多看几眼这份手稿

　　“Making data into art takes skill,” Berry says. “If I had the resources, I would always hire an illustrator.”

　　译文：

　　“把数据变成艺术确实需要技巧

　　如果我有钱我想雇一名插画家

　　那该有多好~”

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