Abstract
The vast majority of toxicological papers summarize experimental data as bar charts of means with error bars. While these graphics are easy to generate, they often obscure essential features of the data, such as outliers or subgroups of individuals reacting differently to a treatment. In particular, raw values are of prime importance in toxicology; therefore, we argue they should not be hidden in messy supplementary tables but rather unveiled in neat graphics in the results section. We propose jittered boxplots as a very compact yet comprehensive and intuitively accessible way of visualizing grouped and clustered data from toxicological studies together with individual raw values and indications of statistical significance. A web application to create these plots is available online.
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Notes
The summary measures (e.g., mean and median) are unweighted with respect to litter sizes, which may be slightly distortive due to the data’s substantial imbalance.
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Pallmann, P., Hothorn, L.A. Boxplots for grouped and clustered data in toxicology. Arch Toxicol 90, 1631–1638 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00204-015-1608-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00204-015-1608-4