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| Figure 1. Display format frequency for the 2008 New England Journal of Medicine. |
In 2009 I did a survey of the use of data displays in a number of leading journals and found that, in all of the sciences that I surveyed, the dominant form of data display was the table.1 This is despite the century-old warning of the brothers Farquhar that: “Getting information from a table is like extracting sunbeams from a cucumber.”2
Figure 1 shows the results for the New England Journal of Medicine, which are essentially identical to those from the Journal of the American Medical Association and all of the other journals I looked at.
