Academic publishing: advanced questions about figure/table positioning
The simple answer is that it doesn't really matter, as long as you're consistent about how you do it.
If you stick with the LaTeX defaults, the figure will always go to the top of each page, and that's a perfectly reasonable convention. If you shift to placing things &quot;nearest&quot;, that's fine as well, but will take more care on your part, since it's easy to end up with unexpected shifts caused by distant upstream changes.