What They Forgot to Teach You

Issue #8

👋 Welcome

This newsletter is 8 issues old and it is SUPER fun to put together but sometimes I feel like I am talking to an empty room. I write the thing, I hit send, it goes off into the void, and I mostly have no idea whether any of it actually helped anyone.

And then this week, I got two emails that made my day.

One of you hit reply and wrote:

"Luckily in my undergrad we were taught to run visual plots, but this has given me more reason behind continuing to do that in my next thesis."

And someone else wrote to let me know:

"Plotting was such a good idea for understanding what was going on in my data. I found my hidden dinosaur and finally figured out why my analysis wasn't working!"

Someone found their dinosaur! I could not be more delighted.

Here is a small ask… if something in here ever helps, hit reply and tell me. And if there is something you are stuck on that you would like me to write about, let me know what that is too.

This issue is an unashamed sequel to last week, digging into how you can plot your raw data and produce a plot that makes your thesis stand out in the crowd.

📖 This week I read

Data Visualisation Using R for Researchers Who Don't Use R — Nordmann, McAleer, Toivo, Paterson & DeBruine (2022), Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. Read it here →​

Prof Emily Nordmann and her colleagues at Glasgow have gone all in on teaching R to psychology students. In this tutorial paper, they walk you from the plot most of us reach for by default, a bar with an error bar on top, up through box plots, violin plots and raincloud plots, arguing at each step that you should be showing the shape of your data and the individual points, not just a summary.

The paper is written for people who do not know how to code in R and it is open access. If you have been meaning to make the leap into the land of ggplot (it’s a FUN place), this is the smoothest on-ramp I know.

🎓 The hidden curriculum

Way back in 2016, I was at my favourite conference (International Congress of Infant Studies) in New Orleans and half the people there seemed to be carrying the same tote bag. The bag had this image printed on it with the message: Friends don't let friends make bar plots.

It was a little campaign called #barbarplots, run by a group of early-career scientists who ran a Kickstarter to put that slogan on bags and t-shirts to get the message out about how bar plots are one of the least informative pictures you can draw, because completely different datasets collapse into the identical bar. Everyone at that conference nodded along. Bars are bad.

But the trouble with a campaign built on what not to do is that it doesn’t offer a useful alternative. Then, in 2018, Micah Allen and colleagues wrote a preprint about raincloud plots that was published the following year in Wellcome Open Research (Allen et al., 2019).

A raincloud stacks three pictures into one. The cloud is a density curve, which shows the shape of your distribution. The rain is every individual data point scattered underneath (yes, just like raindrops). And tucked between them, usually, a box plot displaying the median and the spread. The raincloud plot packages your distribution, raw data and a summary into a single impressive figure.

So here we are, almost ten years on from those tote bags. How has the psych community responded? Ott and colleagues (2025) reviewed the plots in Brief Report papers published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review in 2013 (before rainclouds were a thing) and in 2023 (when rainclouds had been around for a few years). They found that in 2023, 9% of papers used a raincloud plot, up from zero in 2013 (they had not been invented yet). Interestingly, 29% of papers plotted the raw data points in another way, up from just 2% of papers a decade earlier.

What about bar plots? Sadly, just under half of the papers in this journal in 2023 were still bar plots, down on 2013 numbers but still pretty popular. The good news is that the trend of including raw data in plots (raincloud and other) is WAY up. The field is turning, slowly. And if you want your thesis to stand out, you can be ahead of it.

Of course it doesn't make sense to learn R just to make a plot. Here is the good news: you no longer have to. Come along to my Plotting for survey research session, bring your own data, and we will build you a raincloud you can drop straight into your results, no code required (details below).

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📣 Be my 100th order (and I'll make it free)

Something slightly ridiculous is about to happen. A few months ago Reveal Research was just a google doc full of crazy ideas, and this week I am about to tick over 100 orders.

That is not 100 people (plenty of you have come back for more than one workshop, which means the WORLD to me), but still.

So, a little incentive to celebrate the occasion. As of 12pm Monday, I am sitting somewhere between 90 and 100 orders. If you sign up for a paid thing in the next few days and you happen to be order number 100, I will refund you and give you that service for free. That could be a small group coaching session (re general discussion or plotting your data), a Writing Review ($100 per 1000 words), or a 1:1 strategy session (from $180 per hour).

Put your order in at https://www.revealresearch.org/services, you might just get it for free.

💡 What I'm into

Last year I got really obsessed with the Erin Patterson case. The ABC did a great podcast about it and they had a couple of episodes last week covering the appeal. It is crazy to me that the defence can be arguing that the conviction should be overturned at the same time that the prosecution is arguing that the sentencing was not nearly harsh enough. Worth a listen…

📅 Join me

Free Friday workshops — one hour, Zoom session, leave with tips and tricks

• How to write a lot when you have no time — Friday August 28, 12pm AEST. Your thesis gets done in the small pockets you carve out and protect, not the clear week that never comes. Includes a live "Shut Up and Write".
• How to polish your thesis (and get an HD) — Friday September 4, 12pm AEST. Your ideas are good, the HD is in how easily your tired marker can grasp them.

Small group coaching — N= 5, two hours, Zoom session, bring your results and/or data and work through outlining your discussion or making compelling plots together.

• Keep Calm and Write Your General Discussion — Fridays September 11 or September 25, 12-2pm AEST. A$49. You have your results, you just don't know where to start. We work through the six discussion moves together and you leave with an outline.
• **NEW: Plotting for survey research** — Fridays September 4, September 18 or October 2, 1-3pm AEST. A$49. Think plotting is only for experiments with neat conditions to compare? Survey data needs more looking, not less. Bring your data and I’ll help you build the figures that check for problems and tell your story.

Register for everything at www.revealresearch.org/events.

🛠️ For your toolkit

I have been playing with Claude Cowork recently and having it help me create interactive learning resources. This one might be useful if you are just starting your data analysis.

​https://whichtest.netlify.app/​

It is a decision tool for statistical tests that puts the emphasis on the kind of question you are trying to answer. The tool asks you questions about your design and the kind of data you are collecting before recommending a particular test and giving you some template R code (in case that is useful). Let me know if you find it helpful (or if you find mistakes!!).

👋 thanks!!

So this week, before you paste in one more bar plot into your thesis, try plotting the raw points behind it. If you find your dinosaur along the way, hit reply and let me know.

Until next time, Jen

P.S. If a friend's results section is bars all the way down, forward this. It's free, and it might be exactly what they need.

P.P.S. If this is the first What They Forgot to Teach You to actually reach you, issues 1 through 7 are almost certainly sulking in your spam folder. Go and rescue them.

I'm Jen, a developmental psychologist and former UNSW A/Prof. I help new researchers go from feeling like they've missed something everyone else knows, to feeling like they genuinely belong in research, so they can get through their research degree and into the career they actually want. Learn more