Speaking Graphically: An Introduction to Some Newer Graphing Techniques

The vast majority of graphs appearing in the psychiatric literature consist of the traditional line graphs, histograms, and bar charts. Over the past decade, new graphing techniques have appeared which make the data easier to read and which present much more information than simply group means and confidence intervals. These methods include horizontal bar charts, dot charts, stem-and-leaf plots, box plots, and notched box plots. This paper describes these new techniques, as well as older ones, such as smoothing, and warns against using some of the options found in graphics programs: 3-dimensional (3-D) graphs, stacked graphs, and pie charts.