Asr Tables Figures

---
name: asr-tables-figures
description: "Use when building tables and figures for an American Sociological Review (ASR) manuscript. ASR excludes tables and figures from the 15,000-word count but still expects them to be clear, self-contained, and ASA-formatted. Designs exhibits; it does not run the analysis."
category: general-purpose
source_repo: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills
source_path: "American-Sociological-Review-Skills/skills/asr-tables-figures/SKILL.md"
source_url: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/blob/HEAD/American-Sociological-Review-Skills/skills/asr-tables-figures/SKILL.md
---


# Tables & Figures (asr-tables-figures)

Exhibits are where a masked reviewer checks whether the result is real. ASR **excludes tables and
figures from the 15,000-word limit** (text, references, and footnotes count) — so you are not penalized
for a clear exhibit, but it must earn its place and stand on its own.

## When to trigger

- Designing the main results table/figure or a key descriptive exhibit
- Deciding what belongs in the article vs. supplementary materials
- A reviewer found an exhibit unclear, mislabeled, or not self-contained
- Presenting qualitative or comparative-historical evidence in tabular/visual form

## Principles

1. **Self-contained.** Title, row/column labels, and a complete note make each exhibit intelligible
   alone. State the sample, N, units, weighting, and what the estimate is.
2. **Show magnitude and uncertainty.** Effect sizes and intervals — not stars alone. Coefficient and
   marginal-effects plots often beat dense coefficient walls.
3. **Sociology-specific exhibits.** Mobility/transition tables and flow diagrams; survival curves and
   Lexis/age-period-cohort surfaces for demography; network graphs; sequence-analysis chronograms;
   **evidence tables** linking claims to sources for comparative-historical/ethnographic work.
4. **Accessible.** Colorblind-safe palettes; legible in grayscale; no chartjunk or 3D.
5. **Reproducible.** Generated by the master script (quantitative) so numbers match shared materials;
   for qualitative exhibits, excerpts must be faithful to the coded data.

## Format

- Follow the **ASA Style Guide** for table/figure formatting and notes.
- Double-spaced manuscript, Times New Roman 12 pt; place tables/figures per the guidelines.
- Keep identifying information out of exhibits (masked review).

## Exhibit conventions a masked ASR reviewer expects

The ASA flagship admits exhibits from every tradition but holds them to one standard: a reviewer who
may not share your method must be able to read the evidence unaided. Match the exhibit to the
tradition, then verify it carries magnitude and uncertainty.

| Tradition | Workhorse exhibit | The note must state |
|-----------|-------------------|----------------------|
| Quant / stratification | coefficient/marginal-effects plot, mobility table | N, weights, estimator, what the estimate is |
| Demography | survival curve, Lexis surface, decomposition | population, period, age structure |
| Comparative-historical | evidence table (claim → sources), timeline | case set, source provenance |
| Ethnographic | coded-excerpt table with contrary instances | coding scheme, anonymization |
| Network / computational | graph, sequence chronogram, validation table | boundary spec, validation against labels |

## Worked micro-example (illustrative)

A main results table for an administrative-data study of gender wage gaps is redesigned for ASR.

```
Before: 6 columns of coefficients, stars only, no note → reviewer can't tell magnitude or sample
After: marginal-effects plot — adjusted gap 14.2% (95% CI 11.8–16.6), N=412,000, survey-weighted,
  occupation + firm FE; grayscale-legible, colorblind-safe palette
Self-contained note (illustrative): "Predicted gap from a weighted model; bars are 95% CIs;
  estimates reproduce from master.R, seed=11."
```

The redesign makes the exhibit stand alone, leads with the substantive magnitude an inequality scholar
cares about, and ties the numbers to the shared script.

## Referee pushback → ASR-specific fix

- *"I can't read this table without the text."* → Add a complete note (sample, N, units, weighting,
  what the estimate is) so it is intelligible alone.
- *"Stars don't tell me if this matters."* → Replace with effect sizes and intervals, ideally a
  marginal-effects plot a generalist can scan.
- *"Your figure dies in grayscale."* → Re-encode with colorblind-safe, grayscale-legible channels;
  drop chartjunk and 3D.
- *"The qualitative table looks cherry-picked."* → Include contrary excerpts and report the coding
  scheme so the evidence reads as systematic.

## Calibration anchors

- **Exhibits are excluded from the word cap — use the room.** ASR counts text, references, and
  footnotes but not tables/figures, so a clear, self-contained exhibit costs nothing against length.
- **Magnitude over significance.** The flagship's broad readership wants to know how much, with what
  uncertainty, not merely that a coefficient cleared a threshold.
- **One reproducibility standard, two forms.** Quantitative values must match the master script;
  qualitative excerpts must be faithful to the coded data — both are checkable claims to a reviewer.

## Execution bridge (StatsPAI / Stata MCP)

Generate exhibits from the fitted result, not by retyping numbers (the usual source of
body-vs-supplement drift). Full map: [`execution-with-mcp`](../../../shared-resources/empirical-methods/execution-with-mcp.md). ASR is general sociology where observational designs dominate; foreground identification (DiD/IV/RDD), decomposition, and clustered inference.

- **Tables:** `etable` (multi-model columns) or `did_summary_to_latex` straight from the
  `result_id`.
- **Figures:** `plot_from_result` / `enhanced_event_study_plot` / `event_study_table` —
  axis units and the SE/clustering note baked in.
- **Every note** names the estimator + clustering and states the effect size in
  interpretable units.

See a full fitted-result → exhibit chain in the [JF execution walkthrough](../../../Journal-of-Finance-Skills/resources/worked-examples/02-execution-walkthrough.md).
## Anti-patterns

- Tables that require the prose to be intelligible (not self-contained)
- Significance stars with no effect size or interval
- Decorative figures that add no evidence
- Color-only encoding that fails in grayscale or for colorblind readers
- Quantitative exhibit values that don't match the analysis script

## Output format

```
【Main exhibit】what it shows + why a table/figure
【Self-contained?】title + labels + note + N/units/weights present? [Y/N]
【Magnitude + uncertainty shown?】[Y/N]
【Accessible?】grayscale-legible + colorblind-safe? [Y/N]
【Reproducible / faithful?】matches script or coded data? [Y/N]
【Next】asr-writing-style
```

## Supplementary resources

- [`../../resources/external_tools.md`](../../resources/external_tools.md) — plotting, demography, and network visualization tools
- [`../../resources/official-source-map.md`](../../resources/official-source-map.md) — word-count rule (tables/figures excluded) and ASA Style Guide

---

**Source:** [`brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills`](https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) → `American-Sociological-Review-Skills/skills/asr-tables-figures/SKILL.md`