Python on The Augmented Scholar

Matplotlib Publication Figure Template

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Makes a Publication-Quality Figure

Journal requirements typically demand:

300 DPI minimum (often 600 for line art)
Figure width: 86 mm (single column) or 176 mm (double column) — exact values depend on journal
Font size: 8–10pt for axis labels, consistent with body text
No chart junk: white background, no box spines, minimal grid lines
Colour-blind friendly palettes (avoid red/green alone)

This template sets all of these automatically. A single import figure_styles at the top of a notebook applies the preset.

VS Code — The Researcher's Code & Writing Editor

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Researchers Should Use VS Code

VS Code is the tool that unified all my workflows. I write LaTeX, Python scripts, Markdown, and Jupyter Notebooks — all in the same editor, with the same shortcuts.

Matplotlib — Publication-Quality Figures for Researchers

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Matplotlib Is Still the Standard

Despite the rise of Seaborn, Plotly, and Altair, Matplotlib remains the tool you need to know for academic publishing. Every journal has figure requirements (DPI, font size, line weight, column width) and Matplotlib is the most direct way to meet them precisely.

Jupyter — Interactive Notebooks for Research

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why Jupyter Is the Researcher’s Data Analysis Standard

A Jupyter notebook contains code cells and markdown cells interleaved. You run a cell, see the output inline, add a note explaining what you just found, then move to the next step. The result is a document that is simultaneously the analysis and the documentation.

Automate Your Publication List with Python & LaTeX

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Automate Your Publication List with Python — Without Manual Updates

You’re applying for a grant next month. Your CV lists 23 publications, but you haven’t updated your citation count in six months. Google Scholar shows you now have 340 citations (not 287), and your H-index jumped to 12. You manually edit your publication list in LaTeX, rebuild the PDF, and pray you didn’t introduce a typo.

Create Beautiful LaTeX Tables with Pandas & Python

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Generate Publication-Ready LaTeX Tables from CSV Using Pandas — For Researchers & Data Scientists

You’ve spent hours manually formatting a LaTeX table for your research paper. Then your advisor asks you to re-run the analysis with different parameters. Now you’re staring at 200 lines of hand-coded \hline and & delimiters, knowing you’ll have to rebuild the entire table from scratch—and probably introduce formatting errors in the process.

Git and GitHub for Researchers: Version Control Your Work Without Fear

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve lost work before. A hard drive failure, a file accidentally overwritten, a script that worked yesterday that doesn’t today and you have no idea what changed.

Git solves all of these. It’s a version control system — a way of saving the full history of changes to files so you can always go back, identify what changed, and collaborate without conflicts.