Pretty much sure that you’ve all hit something complicated and, after trying to explain it, have grabbed pencil, paper and said something like “Look, you see, it’s …”

And your picture may be completely unlike the thing you’re describing.

Well, hot on the tails of our Archi blog about the challenges with ‘standard care’ as a comparator comes a really nice way of thinking about complex variations in studies included in systematic reviews. Admittedly, the title is a tad off putting “Evidence-based mapping of design heterogeneity prior to meta-analysis: a systematic review and evidence synthesis” but the idea – along with it’s beautiful execution in examples – is that we can use a rather neat tabular design to outline where studies vary and how this might explain differences and need to be understood in our translation / incorporation of the outputs into clinical practice.

There’s a wealth of stuff written about visual display, and of course, an entire industry dedicated to it, but we docs do tend to ignore all that sort of stuff, don’t we?

What’s your ‘best’ example of great graphical representation making something terribly complicated enlightened? Comment, FB us, or tweet it to @ADC_BMJ #NowIsee