“[papers] typically have no more than 8 tables and/or figures and a reference section of no more than 1,500 words.”

So let’s follow this logic…

• These instructions use the word “typically”, meaning “on average” or “normally”.
• “typically” is not a limit or a max, but an average, which means some papers are more and some are less.
• We submitted a paper with 13 tables and figures so we were more than average by 5, but some HFES  papers I have read only have 3 figure/tables, which is less by 5.
• However, our paper is unsubmitted because it “exceeds the recommended figure/table count.”
• However, recommended means a suggested or endorsed position, not a limit or a requirement.
• Therefore, our paper was unsubmitted because we did not follow their suggestion on keeping the table/figure count to more than an “average”?

Does anyone else see this funny logic? And this is supposed to be a journal on how to make this better for humans and this submission process is desperately in need of some human factors!

Take home lesson:

If you are going to put a limit such that things beyond the limit are not acceptable then you need to explicitly say so! If HFES had stated on their instruction page that papers typically have X table/figures and cannot exceed Y table/figures, then we would have written our paper with less than Y table/figures and all would be well. Instead, I have to rewrite parts of the paper to remove 6 figures because we are guessing that 8 is the limit.

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