A case for interactive visualizations in scientific journals
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Updated: Nov 12, 2026

Facilitating the Analysis of Immunological Data with Visual Analytic Techniques
Published on: January 2, 2011
Laura Xie1,2, Ran Blekhman1
1Department of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Abstract:
Biological data sets are becoming increasingly large, and their complexity often exceeds what static figures can convey. Interactive visualizations offer a way for readers to explore results beyond a single snapshot. Sayegh et al. illustrate this approach by including interactive figures to display results from a large phenotypic screen of Streptococcus pneumoniae growth across 190 carbon sources (F. M. Sayegh, C. Scott, K. Ochoa, et al., mSphere e00460-26, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1128/msphere.00460-26). We argue that although such visualizations are increasingly straightforward to build, the barrier to their broader adoption is no longer technical but editorial, and integrating them directly into online articles would meaningfully advance how complex data sets are communicated.
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