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Points of Significance

Visualizing samples with box plots

Nature Methods volume 11, pages 119–120 (2014)Cite this article

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Use box plots to illustrate the spread and differences of samples.

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Figure 1: The construction of a box plot.
Figure 2: Box plots reflect sample variability and should be avoided for very small samples (n < 5), with notches shown only when they appear within the IQR.
Figure 3: Quartiles are more intuitive than the mean and s.d. for samples from skewed distributions.
Figure 4: Box plots are a more communicative way to show sample data.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Martin Krzywinski is a staff scientist at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre.,

    Martin Krzywinski

  2. Naomi Altman is a Professor of Statistics at The Pennsylvania State University.,

    Naomi Altman

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  1. Martin Krzywinski
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  2. Naomi Altman
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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Krzywinski, M., Altman, N. Visualizing samples with box plots. Nat Methods 11, 119–120 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2813

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