"Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.

1. Six tips to make tables more reader-friendly

2. Many research papers typically include one or more data tables, which present the results of an experiment or a survey. An earlier blog post [1] specifically discussed the correct alignment for columns of numbers, which make up such tables: this post offers some tips on how to make these tables, as a whole, more reader-friendly.

4. Highlight a relevant result while referring to a table. Make sure that each table is mentioned in the text of the paper. However, instead of simply referring to a table by its number, say something about the data in the table, as in "Supplementing the diet with iron proved the most effective in raising the haemoglobin content of blood (Table 2)" or "Of the four materials tested, fibreglass offered the least resistance to the flow of water (Table 4).“ Order rows and columns logically. Do not settle for the first arrangement that occurs to you. In particular, the order in which the data were recorded is seldom the most effective way to present the data. Consider arranging the numbers in ascending or descending order.

5. Eliminate repetitive matter. The moment you see a symbol, a word, or a term repeated in every row, check whether such repetitious information can be moved to the head of the column. For example, if you find that every value in a column is followed by the per cent sign (%), delete it from every cell in that column and make sure that it appears in the column heading, as in "No. of obese adults (% of the population)."

6. Use appropriate column alignment. If all the entries in a column share the same unit of measurement, the column should be right- or decimal-aligned. If all the entries do not share a common unit, the column should be left-aligned [1]. Avoid empty cells. Never leave a cell blank or empty: the reader has no means of knowing whether the cell has been left blank intentionally or accidentally. Use a consistent notation to explain such blanks. For example, write N.A. for "Not available" and the em dash (--) for "Not applicable." See an earlier post [2] for a more detailed discussion of the topic.

7. Avoid numbering each row. In many tables, the left-most column is a column of serial numbers: the column heading is typically "Sr. no.," and the rest of the column numbers each row consecutively. This column is rarely useful and can be eliminated from most of the tables. It is only when the rows are referred to by their numbers in the accompanying discussion that the column can be considered useful.

8. References: [1] http://blog.editage.com/Aligning-Columns [2] http://blog.editage.com/Explaining-blank-cells-in-a-table

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