Origin Reports’ Chart of the Month – April Interpreting Bubble Charts
Origin Reports’ Chart of the Month - AprilInterpreting Bubble ChartsBy: Sherrie Hill & Jason RobertsBubble charts are a great way to show multiple aspects of your data in a visually interesting way. Once your audience becomes accustomed to bubble charts, they will quickly take in the various aspects of the chart to gain a deep understanding of the data.Today we are going to look at a percent rejected bubble chart for all initial decisions for a fictitious journal in a given time frame. We will discuss the importance of the size of the bubbles, as well as the color.Bubble sizeFirstly, you will notice that the size of the bubble is related to the number of initial decisions rendered on the manuscripts; the data are pulled from the country of the submitting author in a given time period. For instance, in the figure above, 36 initial decisions were rendered in 2020 on manuscripts originating from China. 24 (67% of the 36 initial decisions) of these were rejected. Larger bubbles indicate countries that received more initial decisions. Bubble size acts as a visual shortcut so that your readers can easily see which countries received the greatest number of initial decisions during the
Diving Deeper into Your Submission Data
Diving Deeper into Your Submission Data By Sherrie Hill and Kristen OverstreetDecember 23, 2021As we approach the end of the year, editorial office staff are beginning to think about their journals’ 2021 submission volume and how it compared to previous years. Submission volume for a journal can be a critical indicator of a journal’s health, but the actual submission number is just the surface information. We can dive deeper into the data and find trends that can be used to steer a journal in new directions.The trend of the submission volume is of particular interest. Everyone wants to know if the submissions are trending upward, staying relatively flat, or decreasing. However, keep in mind any special circumstances that occurred in that year. Were there an unusual number of special issues? Were more conference presenters invited to submit manuscripts? Or were all conferences for that year canceled due to COVID? In 2020, did your journal experience a significant increase in submissions due to researchers having more time to write because they were working from home or was there a significant decrease because clinical researchers were working overtime on COVID-related issues? It is imperative to keep a log of significant events and changes