PlotsOfData—A web app for visualizing data together with their summaries

by Marten Postma, Joachim Goedhart

Reporting of the actual data in graphs and plots increases transparency and enables independent evaluation. On the other hand, data summaries are often used in graphs because they aid interpretation. To democratize state-of-the-art data visualization of raw data with a selection of statistical summaries, a freely available, open-source web app was written using R/shiny that uses the ggplot2 package for generating plots. Users can to choose how to display the data and which of the data summaries to add. In addition, the 95% confidence intervals (95CIs) can be added for visual inferences. By adjusting the visibility of the layers, the visualization of the raw data and their summaries can be tuned for optimal presentation and interpretation. The app is dubbed PlotsOfData and is available at https://huygens.science.uva.nl/PlotsOfData/.