Bioinformatics flowchart for Materials and Methods I am going to start work on the Materials and Methods for a paper I contributed to a lot in the bioinformatics processing part. I have seen some papers nowadays tend to first present the processing steps that they followed as a flow chart, to show the reader what happened generally before going into details in the written M&amp;M section.

Are there any specific guidelines for creating this flowchart? Do you have any tips or advice from personal experience?



(I am aware that this may be off-topic. I have a meta question about it here)
If you're using a workflow management system for pipelining like snakemake or ruffus, you can actually build a flowchart based on the rules/functions in your code:

Snakemake example with the --dag flag:



Ruffus example using pipeline_printout_graph:



You'll probably still need edit the image aftwards in software like inkscape or illustrator though.