Blood Style Guide - Checklist for Text in Blood Figure Images

Blood is unable to edit all figure text to match the stylistic conventions used in copyediting figure legends, tables, and main text. So authors may wish to prepare their figure images following these stylistic conventions. See the Blood Style Guide for full details.

Spelling

For words whose spelling varies between British English and American English, use the American spelling.

Statistics

Capitalize and italicize the P that introduces a P value, and in the P value don’t put a zero to the left of the decimal.

Italicize the p that represents the Spearman rank correlation test.

Italicize the r and R that represent correlation coefficients for, respectively, bivariate and multivariate analysis.

Punctuation

Punctuate numbers of more than 4 digits with a thin space (or, if that is not possible, a regular space) rather than a comma; numbers of 4 digits should be completely closed up except if on a vertical axis with numbers of more than 4 digits.

Use periods (not commas) in decimal numbers.

Symbols

If possible, use true symbols for minus signs, prime signs, and time signs. (Try not to use hyphens for minuses, apostrophes for prime signs, or the letter x for the times sign.)

Abbreviations

If you use abbreviations in a text label, don’t use periods with them, except the abbreviation for number (no.) gets a period.

Abbreviate liter as L, milliliter as mL, minute as min, hour as h, day as d, month as mo, number as no., week as wk, second as s, and kilodalton as kDa. Do not make these and other unit of measurement abbreviations plural.

Formatting

Express exponents as superscripts.

Do not italicize text labels unless the italics have scientific meaning (eg, a gene name).