Tired of the same old bar graphs and line plots, #ScienceTwitter?
Here are 5 lesser-known but powerful graphical methods for visualizing your next publication.
👇
1 – SANKEY DIAGRAM
Great for displaying dynamic processes or flows in a graph.
Example: Flow of immigrants and emigrants to and from a country.
The favourite diagram of marketers optimizing conversion rates of their customers.
2 – TERNARY DIAGRAM
Measured 3 components of something and they sum up to a constant (e.g. 100%)?
Then display this three dimensional data in a two dimensional triangle, without loosing any information.
Example: Soil Composition or relative sources of Income
3 – VIOLIN PLOT
Replace boring box plots with sexy violins.
Box plots don't show the distribution of your data.
Especially multiple peaks are easily visible with a violin but hidden by a box plot.
4 – SPIDER CHART
One of the few graphs correctly representing high dimensional (3 or more) data.
But it can only display a few points at a time.
Alternative uses are to display periodical data, like average temperature across months.
5 – CHORD DIAGRAM
It shines when you need to display (numerical) relations within a group or between multiple groups.
But: Add too much data and it becomes an impressively looking mess.
(Yes, biologists, I am talking to you and your beloved protein interaction networks)
Enjoyed this content?
If so, let me introduce myself,
I am Ilya and this account helps academics to make their journey more effortless.
Follow for hacks on productivity, organisation, mental health and academic writing.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Every academic wants to find meaningful research gaps.
❌ Old way: Read 1000s of papers
✅ New way: A step-by-step, visual strategy
Here's my workflow using Obsidian, Litmaps, Consensus and DrawIO:
(and a webinar on how to do this!)
👇
1. Start with finding research questions
Sometimes there are papers dedicated to identifying them.
This will make your literature review process ENJOYABLE, as you won't follow ideas that are irrelevant (but inspire you personally).
Here are two examples:
2. Next find key papers on this topic.
One of the fastest and easiest ways to get started, is to use @ConsensusNLP GPT.
Find it in the GPT store or just use their website.
Here I just copy and pasted question 8 from the previous image.