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IN 1887 AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, the American Physiological Society (APS) was founded by five clinician scientists (12). Silas Weir Mitchell was, by training, a neurologist, and Henry Pickering Bowditch was a cardiovascular physiologist who had trained in Germany with Carl Ludwig. They joined Henry Newell Martin, an Irish-born cardiovascular physiologist from Johns Hopkins; Russell Henry Chittenden, a biochemist from Yale; and John Green Curtis, a surgeon from Columbia University. The first issue of The American Journal of Physiology (AJP) was published in 1898. Over the past 116 years, seminal and critically important experimental physiological studies have been published in AJP and its many subsections (16). These studies formed the basis, in many cases, for modern medicine and therapeutics. In 1977, AJP was divided into separate discipline-related journals, and thus the American

The present study was undertaken to address the concern that author compliance with American Physiological Society (APS) journal instructions to authors for data presentation in manuscript figures is inadequate. Common instances of noncompliance are omitted molecular weight markers for immunoblots and bar graphs lacking individual data points. The American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology ( AJP-Heart and Circ) editorial team designed a program to assess figure data presentation in submitted manuscripts. The intended outcome was to improve author compliance with APS data presentation guidelines and to improve overall rigor and reproducibility in articles published in AJP-Heart and Circ. The AJP-Heart and Circ team invited 37 peer reviewers to participate in a figure reviewer project (FRp). Over a period of five months, 32 first-revision manuscripts were enrolled in the FRp. Each manuscript was reviewed by the original peer reviewers and an additional figure reviewer (FR). Post-peer review, corresponding authors and FRs were surveyed for insight into their experiences. Of the 32 corresponding authors invited, 20 (63%) responded to the survey. In response to the survey, 100% of respondents stated that peer review was performed in a timely fashion despite the additional FR. When asked whether the FR experience had any effect on how one would present data in manuscript figures in future submissions, 65% of authors and 83% of FRs said yes. In addition, 63% of authors responding agreed that the overall quality of their figures was improved after revising based on FR comments. This exercise resulted in improved compliance with APS data presentation guidelines and changed attitudes among both authors and reviewers as to the need for consistent and clear data presentation in manuscript figures. NEW & NOTEWORTHY The goal of the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology figure reviewer program was to improve author compliance with existing APS data presentation instructions for manuscript figures. The result was an improvement in compliance with these guidelines. Time from submission to final decision did not significantly increase for papers with the additional figure reviewer, and both figure reviewers and corresponding authors reported positive feedback in post-program surveys.