Sparks Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Works

Examples

Figures, Tables, and Typeset Equations

September 2014

Jeffrey R. Groff, Institute of Environmental and Physical Sciences, Shepherd University

The Sparks Journal can accommodate figures, tables, and typeset equations. The following outlines the formatting requirements for such content.

Figures

Science, mathematics, and engineering research articles often include figures, tables, and typeset equations. Figures should be saved as PNG or JPG files with a minimum horizontal resolution of 500px and a maximum horizontal resolution of 720px. For monochromatic figures or those utilizing a small number of colors, the PNG file format usually gives a better result. Each figure also needs to be accompanied by a descriptive caption beginning with the figure’s numerical label as shown below.

Groff_Fig1

Figure 1: The horizontal position of a cheetah as a function of time. The quadratic line-of-best fit is \boldsymbol{x(t) = 0.234t^2 + 2.17t + 5.18}.

Typeset Equations

All typeset equations need to be accompanied by their LaTex source code. Equations typeset using special or unusual LaTex packages cannot be accommodated. Both inline equations (as in the caption to Figure 1) and display equations appearing on their own line can be accommodated. Display equations will be centered and numbered like the following.

(1)   \begin{equation*} x(t) = 0.234t^2 + 2.17t + 5.18 \end{equation*}

(2)   \begin{equation*} v(t) = 0.468t + 2.17 \end{equation*}

(3)   \begin{equation*} a(t) = 0.468 \end{equation*}

Tables

Tabular data needs to also be submitted in JPEG or PNG format like the following example. With few exceptions, PNG encoding will give a better result for tables with a lot of text.

groff_table1Table 1: The position of a cheetah, x, given at specific times, t.

Tables also need to be accompanied by a descriptive caption that begins with the table’s numerical label as shown above.

Additional Details

Each author is to submit source files (text as a Word document or some other editable format, figures and images in .png or .jpg format with a width of at least 720px, text files containing LaTex source for any equations, HTML code for any data tables, etc.) as a zipped archive. A PDF version of each published work will be created and linked to for download as demonstrated below.