• Question: what is the most popular data chart you use in your work?

    Asked by jess10amy to Luca, Liam, Emma, Damian, Alan on 17 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Damian Bailey

      Damian Bailey answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      It’s got to be EXCEL, a MICROSOFT OFFICE program that lets me show off graphs…
      Us scientists make a living by doing experiments and then communicating this (in an understandable form!) to the public…
      They say a picture paints a thousand words and that’s true; showing people graphs is way easier than trying to explain something in clumps of text; especially when you use pretty colours and cool images…!

    • Photo: Liam Bagley

      Liam Bagley answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I again agree with Damian, scientists, like anyone else are drawn in by bright colours and images than words!
      I again use excel. My best has to be a scatter gram showing the improvement in the rate at which my participants in a study burnt fat during exercise, this increased by 15% after the type of training I prescribed them! It got a lot of attention simply from the graph, so it is worth investing the time in your graphs when you write things up for reports!

    • Photo: Alan Richardson

      Alan Richardson answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      This depends on the question i’m answering in my research. The chart type should also be based on the question. For me much of my data points/changes are seen over time so a line graph would be right. However, many of the things we try to investigate often look at relationships so a scattergram with a trend line would be the best type.

      Alan

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