This one was an unexpected and pretty cool result… It turns out that, in scholarly AI publications, including 2-3 diagrams is correlated with higher citation counts after 3 years. The meta- thing here is that it is a bit odd that diagramming practices were found to be at all related to citation count.

There is another big block of work, which is the majority of my PhD thesis, which is about guidelines for NN architecture diagrams. It turns out that there is a correlation between compliance with >10/12 guidelines, and citation count. (This, of course, is only a small part of the evidence supporting the claim that the guidelines are useful – the majority being empirical user studies.)

There is quite a lot of information… I’ve distilled it in the video below, and also made all the code and data publicly available.

Exec summary

Diagrams are measurably important in science, and may capture aspects of good practice.