RevMan5 can create four types of figures for automatic inclusion in reviews:
a methodological quality graph (a bar chart showing overall compliance with the methodological criteria);
a methodological quality summary (an indication of whether individual studies meet the methodological criteria);
paired forest plots of sensitivity and specificity (which can be ordered and grouped by covariates);
summary ROC plots (with variations for including lines, operating points, confidence and prediction regions, and indicating different tests and subgroups using colours).
Authors can also import their own additional figures. All figures need to be created within Figures, and captions specified. To be published with the review the Figures need to be linked to from the text.
Review authors can also include additional figures created by other software. Additional figures should never be used for content that can be included in other ways in RevMan5, for example as standard RevMan5 graphs, tables or created as additional tables. Guidance on technical aspects of preparing additional figures, including appropriate file size, guidance on labelling and captions is available in RevMan5 help files. The images authors upload as additional figures will not be edited or otherwise improved by others, but will be published ‘as is’. It is therefore important that images are fully fit for publication. Important results from all additional figures should be summarized in the Results section of the review text. Wherever numerical results taken from a figure are reported in the text of the review their meaning and derivation should be clear, and a reference to the relevant figure should be provided.
If permission to publish a copyrighted figure is granted, the final phrase of the figure caption must be: “Copyright © [Year] [Name of copyright holder, or other required wording]: reproduced with permission.” Warning! Large images take up lots of disk space. A single large image can easily take up ten times the total space used for the text and tables of the review. This leads to very large export files. Scanned images can be especially space-consuming because the resolution may be much higher than needed. Always use images with a good balance between resolution and detail, and include as few images as possible.