Resources - Sharing Figure Schematics

Every researcher was once a newcomer to academic research. We all learn from various resources in many forms including personal mentoring, research group protocols, published articles and data, friends' help, and so on. Essentially, these resources built and shared by others are true enablers that make all of us be part of the exciting academic journey either in academia or industry and will be for the future generations of researchers as they were to us.

Research papers are for communications of our ideas, academic achievements to our peers, to our society, and to the knowledge basis of humankind in the largest sense. As the dominant forms of communications have evolved – from written/printed texts in the paper publications to include images and videos in the recent digital publications – the necessary resources to help the growing researchers to absorb necessary skills have evolved too. Writing skills have been firmly part of the traditional academic training either by personal mentoring or institutional curriculum. However, more recent forms of communications, especially visual communications by images, illustrations, etc have been less formalized in terms of training of the growing researchers. One of the most conspicuous issues in this rather lagging demand-education chasm is that it is hard to find resources on visual communication skills in academic research except through exclusive mentor-mentee training.

Well, this is a big problem, so no single individual can solve it. Of course, I am far short of doing so. However, reflecting on my struggles to self-educate lots of things without good resources, I want to find ways to contribute. So, I wish to share some of the schematic illustrations of my previously written papers in the original Adobe Illustrator files with my small wish that these might be helpful for my colleagues and peers. I hope that I can catch up with my ever-delaying plan to provide more detailed tips on these topics too, but I think it would be worthy to share these first.

So, the following list provides the bibliographic information of the paper with links to the selected original Adobe Illustrator files for figure schematics that I made before. To avoid potential issues other than serving the main purpose of sharing resources, all selected schematic figures were prepared by myself & before-copyediting versions (so copyright belongs to me) and I have removed all data plots and images other than schematic figures. Please note that the reproduction/reuse of these resources would require appropriate procedures (citation, permission, etc) per the publisher’s policy of the paper to which each figure belongs.

Selected list of my papers with schematic illustration files

• Tough bonding of hydrogels to diverse non-porous surfaces, Nature Materials 15, 190-196 (2016) [link to files]
• Skin-inspired hydrogel-elastomer hybrids with robust interfaces and functional microstructures, Nature Communications 7, 12028 (2016) [link to files]
• Hydraulic hydrogel actuators and robots optically and sonically camouflaged in water, Nature Communications 8, 14230 (2017) [link to files]
• Stretchable living materials and devices with hydrogel-elastomer hybrids hosting programmed cells, Proceedings of National Academy of Science 114, 2200-2205 (2017) [link to files]
• A new 3D printing strategy by harnessing deformation, instability, and fracture of viscoelastic inks, Advanced Materials 30, 1704028 (2018) [link to files]
• Printing ferromagnetic domains for untethered fast-transforming soft materials, Nature 558, 274-279 (2018) [link to files]
• Multifunctional hydrogel skins on diverse polymers with arbitrary shapes, Advanced Materials 31, 1807101 (2019) [link to files]
• Pure PEDOT:PSS hydrogels, Nature Communications 10, 1043 (2019) [link to files]
• Hydrogel bioelectronics, Chemical Society Reviews 48, 1642-1667 (2019) [link to files]
• Dry double-sided tape for adhesion of wet tissues and devices, Nature 575, 169-174 (2019) [link to files]
• Strong adhesion of wet conducting polymers on diverse substrates, Science Advances 6, eaay5394 (2020) [link to files]
• 3D printing of conducting polymers, Nature Communications 11, 1604 (2020) [link to files]
• Instant tough bioadhesive with triggerable benign detachment, Proceedings of National Academy of Science 117, 15497-15503 (2020) [link to files]
• Electrical bioadhesive interface for bioelectronics, Nature Materials 20, 229-236 (2021) [link to files]
• Rapid and coagulation-independent haemostatic sealing by a paste inspired by barnacle glue, Nature Biomedical Engineering 5, 1131-1142 (2021) [link to files]
• An off-the-shelf bioadhesive patch for sutureless repair of gastrointestinal defects, Science Translational Medicine 14, eabh2857 (2022) [link to files]

​​Disclaimer. The contents are my personal opinion and do not represent the view of any institution or company I am affiliated/employed. If you find any incorrect information, please feel free to let me know via my email.