Data Visualization for Biomedical Scientists
This website is the repository for material associated with the book: Boers M. Data visualization for biomedical scientists: creating graphs and tables that work. Amsterdam: VU University Press; 2022.
It contains short tutorial clips, templates, and many of the original Prism files used to make the graphs. The material is ordered by chapter. Please feel free to use this material as a basis to make your own tables and graphs. If you do, please reference my book as above. Please do not redistribute this material without my express prior consent.
Maarten Boers, Dec 2022
Update 2024: annotated coding in R!
Most of the graphs in this book were produced with the program Graphpad Prism. However, many scientists use the open-source software R to analyze their data and produce visualizations. R has powerful visualization tools built in, but they are challenging to unlock and use, so most graphs produced in R do not progress beyond the default settings. While acceptable, such visualizations are usually suboptimal for publication and presentation.
No longer! Mahsoem Ali and Maarten Boers are proud to launch of the website: “Data Visualization in R for Biomedical Scientists”. This website offers annotated R coding for most of the graphs featured in Maarten’s book. It also offers an expanding collection of special cases solved in R.
Click here to open the website.
If you use or format and coding in a publication or presentation, we would appreciate you citing our work, so others can enjoy it too. To cite: Ali M, Boers M. Data visualization in R for biomedical scientists.
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Tables article (pdf)
1.2 Graphs article (pdf)
1.3 Introduction to improving your graphs and tables (mp4)
Chapter 2 Tables
2.1 How to design tables (mp4)
2.2 Table 9 (1) (docx) / Table 9 (2) (docx)
2.3 Improved consort flow diagram (docx)
2.4 Improved prisma flow diagram (docx)
Chapter 3 Graphs
3.1 The principles of graph choice (mp4)
3.2 Unidimensional scatter (mp4)
3.4 Bar and dot plots (mp4)
3.5 Bar and dot plots 2 (pzfx)
3.6 Survival (pzfx)
3.7 The principles of graph design (mp4)
3.9 Time series (pzfx)
3.11 ROC curve (pzfx)
3.12 Bland-Altman plots (mp4)
3.13 Bland-Altman file (pzfx)
3.14 Heatmap (pzfx)
3.15 Null zone (mp4)
3.16 Null zone calculator (xlsx)
3.17 Colorblind table with RGB (pdf)
3.18 Matrix of bar graphs (pzfx)
3.20 Bars-effect of ordering (pzfx)
3.21 Forest plot (pzfx)
Chapter 4 Matrix
4.1 How to design matrix plots (mp4)
4.2 Matrix plots (mp4)
4.3 Simple matrix graph (pzfx)
4.4 Complex matrix graph (pzfx)
4.5 Complex matrix graph for print (pdf)
ZIP File
Here you can download all files (except the movies) in a zip file.