having trouble understanding reviwer comments on manuscript - (Nov/23/2015 )

Hi

We have recently submitted a manuscript  for publication and one of the reviewers has the following comment which we cannot understand; I was hoping someone can help us with it:

during the first revision the comment was as below:

"- there were no titles for charts"

so we added titles to the charts, in the second revision the comment was as below

"there are too lengthy of the figure titles: footnotes are the better explanation for figures rather than text (applicable to all figures)" 

I have attached sample figures and their captions from the paper (I have change the actual sample names to A, B, C ...)

I don't know have to use footnotes for figures and which text I should remove, also only charts in our paper have title but the comment says in should be applied to all figures.

​Thanks

this video explains how to put footnotes perhaps it can be useful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsKwQHOt6E8

In my experience it is very rare to use footnotes for explanation of figures in papers - you might find it in a thesis or book though. Figure legends can be quite extensive, but how extensive depends on the journal that you are applying to. The actual significance of the experiment and discussion of the result should be in the body text.

In general the format of a figure legend should be

Figure XX. SHort title explaining general content. Long title with descriptions of all parts, usually in the format a)  the result of experiment X done using methods F and G. b) the related result of experiment Y using method H. Also include descriptions of all symbols used for charts and how many replicates or statistics used.