Abstract
Abstract. Rainbow colour maps are known to be problematic yet remain widely used in scientific communication. This study extends work by Stoelzle and Stein (2021) to investigate the extent of their use in geoscience publications. It is found that over half (55 %) of all papers surveyed from six geoscience journals from the years 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020 (n=2638) contained at least one visualisation that uses rainbow or red–green colour schemes and are therefore potentially misleading and colour-inaccessible. Recent changes to the submission guidelines for all European Geosciences Union (EGU) journals would seem to place greater responsibility in the future with editors and reviewers to identify and correct colour issues as part of the review process.
Highlights
Data visualisation is a crucial aspect of geoscience communication, and decisions about how colour is used to visualise data are influential in defining which messages are communicated to the reader (Zeller and Rogers, 2020)
The largest reduction in the use of rainbow colour maps was found to be in Earth System Dynamics (ESD), in which the proportion of papers containing at least one such visualisation reduced from 33 % in 2015 to 10 % in 2020, albeit based on a smaller sample size than for the other journals (n = 46 in 2015; n = 69 in 2020)
Despite widespread recognition of the weaknesses of rainbow colour maps and of the wider issues associated with the use of red–green colour schemes, the results of this study suggest that both continue to be widely used in geoscience publications
Summary
Data visualisation is a crucial aspect of geoscience communication, and decisions about how colour is used to visualise data are influential in defining which messages are communicated to the reader (Zeller and Rogers, 2020). The encoding accuracy of colour has been criticised, with respect to the rainbow (or jet) colour map (Rogowitz and Treinish, 1998; Borland and Taylor, 2007; Liu and Heer, 2018; Crameri et al, 2020). These criticisms relate to (i) the concurrent use of red and green, which are hard to distinguish for up to 4 % of the global population with colour vision deficiency (CVD) (Light and Bartlein, 2004; Nuñez et al, 2018), and (ii) its tendency to exhibit non-uniform luminance across its length, which disproportionately, and in some cases misleadingly, draws attention to the yellow and cyan elements (e.g. Rogowitz and Treinish, 1998; Borland and Taylor, 2007; Hawkins, 2018). A recent systematic review of around 1000 scientific publications from three different journals by Stoelzle and Stein (2021) concluded that 16 %–24 % of the publications used a rainbow colour map, with a similar proportion (18 %–29 %) using red–green elements without an alternative way of distinguishing them, meaning that approximately one in every two papers has colour issues
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