Back

Quantifying Data Distortion in Bar Graphs in Biological Research

Lin, T.-J.; Landry, M. P.

2024-10-04 scientific communication and education Community evaluation
10.1101/2024.09.20.609464 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Over 88% of biological research articles use bar graphs, of which 29% have undocumented data distortion mistakes that over- or under-state findings. We developed a framework to quantify data distortion and analyzed bar graphs published across 3387 articles in 15 journals, finding consistent data distortions across journals and common biological data types. To reduce bar graph-induced data distortion, we propose recommendations to improve data visualization literacy and guidelines for effective data visualization.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.