‘Word Cloud’ as a Graphical Supplement to a Scientific Article (Editor-in-Chief’s Column)

An ever-greater number of journals now not only publish text content but also try to provide graphical abstracts for manuscripts. A graphical abstract is a graphical presentation of the main conclusions of the paper. The figure can be taken from the paper or specially designed. At the same time, it should represent the content of the paper as much as possible and be understandable for readers. However, it is not always possible to create a graphical abstract, for example, for review and theoretical articles in the field of social and economic sciences. The editors of the Economic Consultant journal suggested publishing a “word cloud” as a graphical supplement to a scientific paper. Since 2019, the “word cloud” has been published for each paper. A word cloud is a visualization of word frequency in a text. The font size of each word in the "cloud" is determined by its prevalence in the text. The word cloud helps readers to understand what basic keywords and terms the author uses directly in the text of the paper. To present this visualization, the editors decided to use the service https://wordscloud.pythonanywhere.com/. The layout designer can process the paper, using only its text (without the title, abstract, and references). From 2020, the editorial board decided to publish such graphical supplements not only in pdf articles but also on the pages of journal articles. However, we understand that graphical supplements cannot substitute for graphical abstracts, and the development of the latter seems to us to be a promising trend in the development of the Economic Consultant journal.