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 training curve is the standard figure that is easiest to lose, because the numbers exist only while the loop is running. Append (epoch, train_loss, val_loss, val_metric) to a CSV under results/ inside the loop, before it returns. A list held in memory, or a per-seed dict collected at the end of a function, is not a trace — it is a variable that goes out of scope. Measured across one 40-task batch and its two comparators, 135 Python files contained zero plots with an epoch axis, and the requirement asking for one scored 0 on the task where it carried half the weight.

How to decide

At design time, before any results exist, ask: what figures does a paper making this kind of claim always contain? Put those in the plan as the first slots. Then add the figures your specific angle needs.

If you cannot produce a standard figure — the run does not have that quantity — say so where it would have gone, in one sentence, rather than leaving the reader to notice the absence.