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BoxPlotR: a web tool for generation of box plots

Nature Methods volume 11, pages 121–122 (2014)Cite this article

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Despite the obvious advantages of the box plot for simultaneous representation of data set and statistical parameters, this method is not in common use, in part because few available software tools allow the facile generation of box plots. For example, the standard spreadsheet tool Excel is unable to generate box plots. Here we describe an open-source application, called BoxPlotR, and an associated web portal that allow rapid generation of customized box plots. A user-defined data matrix is uploaded as a file or pasted directly into the application to generate a basic box plot with options for additional features. Sample size may be represented by the width of each box in proportion to the square root of the number of observations5. Whiskers may be defined according to the criteria of Spear1, Tukey2 or Altman3. The underlying data distribution may be visualized as a violin or bean plot or, alternatively, the actual data may be displayed as overlapping or nonoverlapping points. The 95% confidence interval that two medians are different may be illustrated as notches defined as ±(1.58 × IQR/√n) (ref. 5). There is also an option to plot the sample means and their confidence intervals. More complex statistical comparisons may be required to ascertain significance according to the specific experimental design6. The output plots may be labeled; customized by color, dimensions and orientation; and exported as publication-quality .eps, .pdf or .svg files. To help ensure that generated plots are accurately described in publications, the application generates a description of the plot for incorporation into a figure legend.

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Figure 1: Data visualization with box plots.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust through a Senior Research Fellowship to J.R. (084229), a core grant to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology (092076), a European Research Council grant (233457) to M.T., a Genome Québec International Recruitment Award to M.T. and a Canada Research Chair in Systems and Synthetic Biology to M.T.

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  1. Michaela Spitzer

    Present address: Present address: Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Michaela Spitzer, Jan Wildenhain, Juri Rappsilber & Mike Tyers

  2. Department of Biotechnology, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Juri Rappsilber

  3. Department of Medicine, Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Mike Tyers

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  1. Michaela Spitzer
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  2. Jan Wildenhain
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  3. Juri Rappsilber
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Correspondence to Juri Rappsilber or Mike Tyers.

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Spitzer, M., Wildenhain, J., Rappsilber, J. et al. BoxPlotR: a web tool for generation of box plots. Nat Methods 11, 121–122 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2811

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