Web Based Multidimensional Interactive Visualizations as Supplemental Material for Biological Research Articles

Abstract

The goal of this study is to give a proof of concept model of a multidisciplinary interactive visualization that can be easily hosted in an online format as supplemental material for research papers. The hope is that by creating visualizations that are more easily readable by a wider audience, while still maintaining the same quality and depth of information that scientists and students require both within interdisciplinary teams or whose current research data stems from fields outside of their own expertise, readers can in turn more readily access and understand the content presented. Many papers do not fully utilize visualization techniques developed to best grab a reader’s attention and highlight important information. Interactivity is one of these key aspects of this study and has only been used in scientific visualizations for a short time and not in the manner that is being suggested here. (Pavlopoulos 2015) In this study, a conceptual multidimensional interactive visualization was built and compared to a few examples of graphics and visualization tools currently employed within scientific research (https://timlink18.github.io/) . More work can certainly be done towards making such a visualization accessible and developing ways to generate such visualizations with effortlessness for scientists wanting to display their information in this manner. On the reader’s end, the work showed that dense information that would otherwise convolute a static graphic and require multiple pages of different graphics, can easily be accessed and explored on a single interactive visualization