PubMed Figure Viewer Lets Scientist Experience Bar Chart The Way An Ant Would

PHILADELPHIA, PA—Clicking on Figure 3 of a recently published open-access paper on PubMed Central in order to examine the data more closely, postdoctoral researcher Dr. Sarah Kim, 30, confirmed Tuesday that the NIH’s proprietary figure viewer had instead transported her inside the figure, allowing her to experience a standard five-panel bar chart the way a tiny insect would.

The viewer, which opens in a separate browser tab and displays a magnified portion of the selected image, presented Kim with approximately 6% of the figure at a magnification she described as “forensic.” She could see individual pixels. She could see compression artifacts. She could not see data.

She dragged the image to reposition. She glimpsed the y-axis label, which read “Relative fold cha” briefly before it disappeared from viewable area. She double-clicked to magnify further, as instructed, and was now looking at what she believed was part of panel B, though she could not confirm this because the panel label was no longer visible. Kim attempted to zoom out. There was no zoom out option. She pressed Ctrl+minus. The browser shrank around the viewer, which remained the same size. She right-clicked and selected "Open image in new tab," which opened the same viewer in a second tab. She now had two tabs, each showing a different fragment of the same bar chart at a magnification similar to what might be obtained using a scanning electron microscope. “I am a person with a PhD navigating a figure the way you navigate Google Street View,” she said. “I am standing inside this figure.”

At press time, Kim had closed the viewer, returned to the PDF, and was squinting at Figure 3, which was approximately one inch wide on page 19 of a 32-page document, and which she described as “the superior viewing experience.”