Published October 13, 2021 | Version v1

Rainbow colour maps remain widely used in the geosciences

Authors/Creators

  • 1. University of Bristol

Description

This dataset is the result of a systematic survey to investigate the extent to which rainbow colour maps are used in geoscience publications. The collection method and results are described in Westaway, R. M. (2022) 'GC Insights: Rainbow colour maps remain widely used in the geosciences'. Geoscience Communication, 5, 83–86, https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-5-83-2022. 

Papers were surveyed from five journals - Earth System Dynamics (ESD), Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Ocean Science (OS), Solid Earth (SE) and The Cryosphere (TC) - for the years 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. The final data set includes the pre-existing Stoelzle and Stein (2021) survey data for HESS, which is independently available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5145746 (Stoelzle, 2021). All papers (n=2638) were classified according to the type of colour encoding used.

year = year of publication (YYYY)
title = full paper title
authors = list of authors seperated by semi-colon
n_authors = number of authors
col_code = color-issue classification (see below)
volume = Journal volume
start_page = first page of paper (where available)
end_page = last page of paper (where available)
base_url = url to access the paper on the journal website 
filename = file name of the PDF version of the paper

Color classification is stored in the col_code variable with:

0 = Colour visualisations with no colour issues
1 = At least one visualisation with red-green issues
2 = At least one visualisation with a rainbow colour map
bw = Black and white paper

Files

GC_rainbowsurvey_data.txt

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Additional details

Related works

Is published in
Publication: 10.5194/gc-5-83-2022 (DOI)

Funding

European Commission
GlobalMass - Global land ice, hydrology and ocean mass trends 694188