+
Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • This Month
  • Published:

Points of Significance

Visualizing samples with box plots

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

Subjects

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

Access through your institution
Buy or subscribe

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Access through your institution

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

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

  1. McGill, R., Tukey, J.W & Larsen, W.A. Am. Stat. 32, 12–16 (1978).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. Nat. Methods 10, 921–922 (2013).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Streit, M. & Gehlenborg, N. Nat. Methods 11, 117 (2014).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Spitzer, M. et al. Nat. Methods 11, 121–122 (2014).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

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

Authors
  1. Martin Krzywinski
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Naomi Altman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

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

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2813

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing
点击 这是indexloc提供的php浏览器服务，不要输入任何密码和下载