Current Issues with Data Presentation and Publication

Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) has become a common technique used in the characterization of crystalline materials in the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). A quick literature survey shows that since 1997, there have been over 29,000 individual publications that mention the EBSD technique. Unfortunately, there has been very little effort to discuss or standardize how or what should be included when EBSD data is presented. This presentation will briefly introduce the technique of EBSD. The discussion will then turn to appropriate ways to present EBSD data and some of the problems and pitfalls that have been commonly observed in the published literature. These include proper use of reference frames, the ethics of data “cleaning”, what can we really tell about a sample’s grain size from a single section, what IPF maps to present and how to describe them so that they are useful to the reader, what do we need to provide along with our pretty EBSD maps to make them most useful, and finally data sample size. Careful and thoughtful presentation of EBSD data can allow the technique to progress beyond the creation of pretty pictures and to allow EBSD to become accepted as a quantitative characterization technique.