Top Software for Creating Professional Graphical Abstracts in Research (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: There are mainly three of them that you can use and two of them are free and one of them might be free at your institute. Hello scientists. Welcome back to DrawBioMed, the tutorial channel that teaches scientists to create professional graphical abstracts for their research publication. So a question that I often get from my workshop participants is which software is suitable for creating graphical abstracts for my research. There are mainly three of them that you can use and two of them are free and one of them might be free at your institute. So the first one is PowerPoint. Yes, you can create very professional looking graphical abstracts in your PowerPoint. Here's the example that I use at the workshop. As you can see, it can already achieve a fairly good nature review style by using only PowerPoint. Another special niche about PowerPoint is that if you want to create animation out of your graphical abstract, you can very easily do that with the pre-existing functions animation function in PowerPoint. That is the first one that you can use and I also believe it might be the one that most people use. Let me know if you also use PowerPoint to create your graphical abstract. Another free one is called Inkscape. So Inkscape is an open source free software that allows you to draw vector images. Vector images are calculated by the computer with the path that you created. So therefore, you can achieve very geometric shapes and very smooth lines comparing to you drawing it with freehand. Therefore, Inkscape is a perfect tool for you to create these graphical abstract and vector based images. The third one is Adobe Illustrator. It might be free at your university or research institute. You can check it with your institution whether they have a subscription to the Adobe Creative Suite. So it is the most professional one that people use to create vector based images and also do graphic design. I do believe all the illustrations you see on nature and science are all created by Adobe Illustrator. Personally, when I'm taking professional cases, I also use Adobe Illustrator. A lot of its functions and tools are very very well established and with a very long history of iteration. There are also a lot of tutorials online to solve your technical problems and almost always you can find a tutorial to establish a new approach of designing your graphical abstract. Welcome to comment below to let me know which software you like to use to create your graphical abstract, which one is accessible at your institute or university, and which one you'd like to learn more in my tutorials. Welcome to visit my tutorials and also subscribe to DrawBioNet to learn about the art of creating scientific illustrations. I look forward to seeing you there.