Data Visualizations, Infographics, and Graphical Abstracts: What’s the Difference?

When I’m planning a new product with a client, one of the first things I try to get clear on is terminology. When someone wants me to develop a “dataviz” or an “infographic,” what does that mean?

And it’s not that I’m dense, or that my client is. The terms “data visualization,” “infographic,” and “graphical abstract” have a lot of conceptual overlap. There is also wide variation in what each of these products can look like. So, I wanted to take a few minutes to define each of these products, discuss their overlap, and share some examples.

What is a data visualization?

A data visualization is the graphical representation of quantitative or qualitative information. It’s a fancy term for visuals like line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, data tables, maps, word clouds, and such. (Here are some examples of exploratory data visualizations I really like!)

What is an infographic?

An infographic combines images and text to convey data and other information. Infographics often include one or more data visualizations.

Technically, a single graph with some brief explanatory text could be an infographic. But, I find that when people use the term “infographic,” they’re often envisioning a single panel that includes decorative images, multiple data visualizations, and some text that describes the pieces of the infographic and how they fit together. (I’ve pinned a bunch of examples here.)

What is a graphical abstract?

A graphical abstract is an infographic that summarizes a specific journal article or presentation. To say it differently, all graphical abstracts are infographics, the former are just special in their purpose of summarizing a single, other communication product. Because of that purpose, graphical abstracts tend to be smaller in both size and scope than other infographics. (I have lots more to say about graphical abstracts here.)

What is a research poster?

Ah-HA! Surprise fourth topic!

A research poster is a large-scale visual representation of (usually) a single research study.

In practice, most research posters look like someone printed out a manuscript and stapled each of the pages to a bulletin board. They’re tightly packed with paragraphs of tiny text, and the data visualizations were created by dumping data into 5×10 tables and 36-bar charts using PowerPoint’s default 10-color color scheme.

In theory, and according to everything we know about human perception and learning, a research poster should instead be made up of multiple explanatory data visualizations, good amounts of white space, and small amounts of legible text.

In other words, visually, a well-designed research poster should look like an “infographic” or “graphical abstract.” (On our Work Samples page, you’ll notice that we lump infographics, graphical abstracts, and posters together.)

Whether you want to share your research with data visualizations, infographics, graphical abstracts, or research posters, Data Soapbox can help! Contact us to learn more.