Discovery’s Edge: The fault in our bars

When bar charts take over the world of scientific figures, Mayo Clinic researchers and colleagues sound the alarm.

Looking up, into the night sky overwhelms the senses. All those stars, all that space.

Then the brain picks up a pattern—three bright stars? Oh, that’s Orion’s belt.

And from there a viewer can find the Orion nebula, Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, and Saiph and Rigel; all stars in the The Hunter constellation.

Connecting the Dots
Patterns in the night sky allow viewers to gain and process information. Similarly, scientific data has patterns that tell a story. But that story can be obscured by the way it’s presented, so Mayo Clinic researchers and their colleagues are working on better ways to present and share scientific data. To do that, they assessed how data are presented currently.

Information Design Team Assemble!
Tracey Weissgerber, Ph.D., is a Mayo Clinic hypertension researcher and a National Institutes of Health Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health scholar, mentored by Vesna Garovic, M.D., a nephrology and hypertension specialist at Mayo.

Drs. Weissgerber and Garovic formed a multidisciplinary team with biomedical statistics and informatics specialist Natasa Milic, M.D., Ph.D.; and software engineer Marko Savic from the University of Belgrade Medical School, as well as Stacey Winham, Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic biostatistician. Read the rest of the article.
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