A Postscript to Wainer's "Understanding Graphs and Tables"
James R. Hartley · Educational Researcher · 1992
First of all, tables appear hand in hand with text, and the text usually makes references to the tables at appropriate points. Thus Wainer starts, We begin with Table 1. Unfortunately many printers, when positioning tables in the text, do so without reference to this textual pointer. Tables are fitted to the top or the bottom of the page and within the column width(s). One consequence of this is that a table is often placed in the wrong place. In Wainer's article, for example, the text is discussing Table 2 before Table 1 is presented. A similar problem occurs in an article by Bailey (1990). Here Table 2 occurs after the start of the discussion of Table 3, and Table 3 occurs in a subsequent section of the text when the author is discussing Table 4. Such mismatches in sequence are not uncommon in scientific articles. I estimated, for example, that they occurred nearly 30% of the time in two journals published by the American Psychological Association (Hartley, 1991a). Communication would be enhanced if such mismatches were avoided.