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A checklist for designing and improving the visualization of scientific data

Nature Cell Biology volume 27, pages 879–883 (2025)Cite this article

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Creating clear and engaging scientific figures is crucial to communicate complex data. In this Comment, I condense principles from design, visual perception and data visualization research in a checklist that can help researchers to improve their data visualization, by focusing on clarity, accessibility and design best practices.

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Fig. 1: Basics for figures.
Fig. 2: Designing figures.
Fig. 3: Feedback for figures.

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Acknowledgements

I thank my colleagues T. Weissgerber, A. Gucek, S. Royle and J. P. Saenz for feedback on the draft version of this Comment, as well as the many students of my data-viz courses, whose examples continually expand my expertise and whose requests for an easy-to-follow workflow inspired this checklist.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Data Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Visualization and Simulation, University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons, Chur, Switzerland

    Helena Klara Jambor

  2. National Center for Tumor Diseases, University Cancer Center, NCT-UCC, Universitätsklinikum Carl Gustav Carus an der Technischen Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Helena Klara Jambor

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  1. Helena Klara Jambor
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Correspondence to Helena Klara Jambor.

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Competing interests

H.K.J. received a salary from a habilitation award of the Medical Faculty of the Technische Universität Dresden. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Nature Cell Biology thanks Beth Cimini and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Jambor, H.K. A checklist for designing and improving the visualization of scientific data. Nat Cell Biol 27, 879–883 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41556-025-01684-z

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