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Complaining about ineffective graphics is easy — fixing them takes time and love. After receiving a migrane-inducing graphic, I set out on a mission to tell the story of the data — obesity patterns around the world.
Visit the Graphical Abstract Hospital to see redesigns of real-world abstracts and learn practical design guidelines for graphical abstracts and small figures.
The Nature Methods Points of View column column offers practical advice in design and data presentation for the busy scientist.

Effective poster design for science communication

Guidelines to get you started and keep you going

poster guideline webinar

Effective Poster Design webinar, part of the BCCHR Summer Program.

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Designing for color blindness

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Nature Methods: Points of View

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Nature Methods: Points of Significance
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Beyond Belief Campaign BRCA Art

Wed 11-06-2025

Fuelled by philanthropy, findings into the workings of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes have led to groundbreaking research and lifesaving innovations to care for families facing cancer.

This set of 100 one-of-a-kind prints explore the structure of these genes. Each artwork is unique — if you put them all together, you get the full sequence of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 proteins.

Propensity score weighting

Mon 17-03-2025

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. —Mr. Spock (Star Trek II)

This month, we explore a related and powerful technique to address bias: propensity score weighting (PSW), which applies weights to each subject instead of matching (or discarding) them.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Propensity score weighting. (read)

Kurz, C.F., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2025) Points of significance: Propensity score weighting. Nat. Methods 22:1–3.

Happy 2025 π Day—
TTCAGT: a sequence of digits

Thu 13-03-2025

Celebrate π Day (March 14th) and sequence digits like its 1999. Let's call some peaks.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
2025 π DAY | TTCAGT: a sequence of digits. The digits of π are encoded into DNA sequence and visualized with Sanger sequencing. (details)

Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance

Sun 09-03-2025

I don’t have good luck in the match points. —Rafael Nadal, Spanish tennis player

Points of Significance is an ongoing series of short articles about statistics in Nature Methods that started in 2013. Its aim is to provide clear explanations of essential concepts in statistics for a nonspecialist audience. The articles favor heuristic explanations and make extensive use of simulated examples and graphical explanations, while maintaining mathematical rigor.

Topics range from basic, but often misunderstood, such as uncertainty and P-values, to relatively advanced, but often neglected, such as the error-in-variables problem and the curse of dimensionality. More recent articles have focused on timely topics such as modeling of epidemics, machine learning, and neural networks.

In this article, we discuss the evolution of topics and details behind some of the story arcs, our approach to crafting statistical explanations and narratives, and our use of figures and numerical simulations as props for building understanding.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance. (read)

Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2025) Crafting 10 Years of Statistics Explanations: Points of Significance. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application 12:69–87.

Propensity score matching

Mon 16-09-2024

I don’t have good luck in the match points. —Rafael Nadal, Spanish tennis player

In many experimental designs, we need to keep in mind the possibility of confounding variables, which may give rise to bias in the estimate of the treatment effect.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Propensity score matching. (read)

If the control and experimental groups aren't matched (or, roughly, similar enough), this bias can arise.

Sometimes this can be dealt with by randomizing, which on average can balance this effect out. When randomization is not possible, propensity score matching is an excellent strategy to match control and experimental groups.

Kurz, C.F., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2024) Points of significance: Propensity score matching. Nat. Methods 21:1770–1772.

Martin Krzywinski | contact | Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences CentrePHSA
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