Should I use ‘adapted from’ in an illustration of conclusions based on the results of others

Question

Suppose, you cite some particular ideas, analyze them, and come up with a few conclusions, which you illustrate in a figure that is totally yours. The labels or conclusions represented in the illustration are neither other people’s work nor my own primary empirical findings. They are somewhere between: my own conclusions, yet based on the data of others. In the caption of the figure, should you write adapted from to show that the figure was ‘sourced’ from other studies (i.e., the conclusions and analysis were built on other resources)?

For example, assume that Study X claims:

Helping people leads to profitability.

Based on that, I conclude that companies should adopt the notion of social responsibility. Among other conclusions, I represent social responsibility in a schematic. Should I write adapted from Study X to say that the conclusion of social responsibility was built on the material from Study X?

Answer 1

Disclaimer: As the answer to your question could be field-specific, my answer is from an (electrical) engineering point-of-view.

I think the general consensus in my field is that "adapted from" in a figure caption is to be taken very literally: it is to indicate to the reader that a figure from a previous publication has been adapted for use in the new figure¹.

Since you are not adapting a previously published figure for use in your manuscript, it seems, then, that the situation you describe does not warrant the "adapted from" disclaimer in the figure caption.

Instead, you should use the main body text to stitch the various references together [with appropriate citations] to support your position, call out the figure in question in the text, and [depending on how much additional detail your figure caption needs relative to the development of the idea(s) in the main body text] an appropriate figure caption.

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¹An example of using "adapted from" in a figure caption in my field might be the following:

Your competitor's paper A incorporates top-level circuit schematic B in figure C. Your follow-on paper D utilizes circuit B, but you redraw the schematic to highlight the points more relevant to your paper D in new figure E. In this case, the caption of figure E would indicate that the figure was adapted from paper A.