Graphical integrity issues in open access publications: Detection and patterns of proportional ink violations

• Main Authors: Acuna, D.E (Author), Huang, T.-Y (Author), Zhuang, H. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science 2021
• Subjects: Article; audiovisual aid; Audiovisual Aids; Biomedical Research; computer graphics; Computer Graphics; data analysis; Databases, Factual; deep learning; factual database; geographic distribution; graphical integrity issue; human; Humans; image analysis; image processing; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; information processing; medical research; open access publishing; Open Access Publishing; peer review; procedures; proportional ink violation; psychology; reproducibility; Reproducibility of Results; trend study
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Academic graphs are essential for communicating complex scientific ideas and results. To ensure that these graphs truthfully reflect underlying data and relationships, visualization researchers have proposed several principles to guide the graph creation process. However, the extent of violations of these principles in academic publications is unknown. In this work, we develop a deep learning-based method to accurately measure violations of the proportional ink principle (AUC = 0.917), which states that the size of shaded areas in graphs should be consistent with their corresponding quantities. We apply our method to analyze a large sample of bar charts contained in 300K figures from open access publications. Our results estimate that 5% of bar charts contain proportional ink violations. Further analysis reveals that these graphical integrity issues are significantly more prevalent in some research fields, such as psychology and computer science, and some regions of the globe. Additionally, we find no temporal and seniority trends in violations. Finally, apart from openly releasing our large annotated dataset and method, we discuss how computational research integrity could be part of peer-review and the publication processes. © 2021 Zhuang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.