Diagram: dot plot — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

ggplot2 example: dot plot — Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020) (CC0)

chart

dot plot

Distribution in which each observation is a dot stacked above its value.

Classification

chart
points and bubbles › dot strips
distribution

Channels

position on common scale; main: value of the observation (on the x-axis)
length; secondary: count in the bin (height of the dot stack)
spatial region; secondary: bin

Variants

quantile dot plotquantiles
wheat plotexact value within the bin

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 2 295 papers since 1977, 49% in the last five years; mostly in Medicine, Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology, Immunology and Microbiology

Seminal references

formalization (1999) Wilkinson (1999). Dot Plots. The American Statistician (82 citations)

R packages

R ggplot2::geom_dotplot(); GitHub 7 025 stars; last commit 2026-10; paper (33 455 citations)

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(palmerpenguins)

gentoo <- penguins |>
  filter(species == "Gentoo")

p <- ggplot(gentoo, aes(x = flipper_length_mm)) +
  geom_dotplot(binwidth = 1, fill = "#7d7d7d", colour = "#535353",
               stroke = 0.5, na.rm = TRUE) +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = lex_number, breaks = lex_break_breaks, expand = lex_break_expand) +
  scale_y_continuous(NULL, breaks = NULL) +
  labs(title = "Gentoo flippers are 203 to 231 mm long, most often 215 mm",
       subtitle = "One dot per penguin (123 Gentoos), in 1 mm bins",
       x = "Flipper length (mm)",
       caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "x", break_not_zero = "x")

Sources (34)

263 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 11 books

Show the 34 sources

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/dot-plot.html

ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. dot plot. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/dot-plot.html

BibTeX

@incollection{taudiere2026-dot-plot,
  author    = {Taudière, Adrien},
  title     = {dot plot},
  booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  publisher = {IdEst},
  url       = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/dot-plot.html},
  note      = {CC0 1.0}
}

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-10-22. Images last changed on 2026-11-12. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.