Commonly used for: demonstrating phenomena over time or into the future, such as by visualizing time series data or plotting a linear regression

Similar to:

• Scatter plots

Examples:

Citation: Roser, M. (2021). Smoking: How large of a global problem is it? And how can we make progress against it?. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/smoking-big-problem-in-brief

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Commonly used for: displaying hierarchical, nested information -- usually at a high level of granularity that combines color, shape, text, and numbers

Examples:

Citation: Observatory of Economic Complexity. (2020). What does United States export? https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/usa/all/show/2020/

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Commonly used for: representing magnitude via color and dimensionality; clustering data by variation in space

Examples:

Citation: Bostroem, A., Bekolay, T., &  Staneva, V. (eds). (2016). Software Carpentry: Programming with Python, Version 2016.06. https://github.com/swcarpentry/python-novice-inflammation, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.57492.

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Commonly used for: categorizing related information together by size, which is represented by the length or height of the bar; these types of charts can be grouped or stacked to represent multiple types of information at once

Examples:

Citation: Pol, R., Ruggiero, T., Bezzi, M., Camisassa, D., & Carossa, S. (2022). Programmed-release intraosseus anesthesia as an alternative to lower alveolar nerve block in lower third molar extraction: a randomized clinical trial. Journal of Dental Anesthesia and Pain Medicine, 22(3), 217-226. https://doi.org/10.17245/jdapm.2022.22.3.217

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Commonly used for: demonstrating the distribution of continuous data; not to be confused with a bar chart, though histograms often look like bar charts

Examples:

Citation: Waskom, M. L., (2021). seaborn: statistical data visualization. Journal of Open Source Software, 6(60), 3021, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03021, https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/histogram_stacked.html

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Commonly used for: comparing summary statistics across groups; useful for viewing minimums, maximums, quartiles, outliers, etc. across variables in a dataset

Similar to:

• Violin plots

Examples:

Citation: Waskom, M. L., (2021). seaborn: statistical data visualization. Journal of Open Source Software, 6(60), 3021, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.03021, https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/grouped_boxplot.html

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Commonly used for: presenting themes identified and applied to qualitative data during analysis (a process often called qualitative data coding)

Examples:

Citation: Zhang, Y., Gutman, T., Tong, A. et al. (2023). Child and caregiver perspectives on access to psychosocial and educational support in pediatric chronic kidney disease: a focus group study. Pediatric Nephrology 38, 249–260. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00467-022-05551-z 

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Commonly used for: showing percentages of a whole, such as by visualizing answer percentages from total respondents to a question in a survey; many data visualization experts recommend using caution when selecting pie charts as your visualization method, as they can be difficult to quickly interpret

Similar to:

• Donut charts
• Waffle charts

Examples:

Citation: Borchardt, R., Bruce, S., Click, A., & Brief, I. (2022). Are we walking the talk? A snapshot of how academic LIS journals are (or aren’t) enacting disciplinary values. the Library with the Lead Pipe.