Visualization VocabularyDataviz vocabulary
Diagram: radial bar chart
Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)
Explanatory diagram: radial bar chart
Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)
ggplot2 example: radial bar chart
Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: gapminder (Bryan 2025) (CC BY 4.0)

chart

radial bar chart

also: circular bar chart, radial chart

Bars laid out along a circular axis.

Classification

  • chart
  • radial › polar bars
  • magnitude

Channels

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 13 papers since 2021, 54% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics

R packages

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(gapminder)

largest <- gapminder |>
  filter(year == 2007) |>
  slice_max(pop, n = 10) |>
  mutate(country = reorder(droplevels(country), pop),
         pop = pop / 1e6)

p <- ggplot(largest, aes(x = country, y = pop)) +
  geom_col(width = 0.7, fill = "#9b2367") +
  geom_text(aes(y = 0, label = country), hjust = 1.05, size = 2.6) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = lex_number, breaks = seq(0, 1200, 300), limits = c(0, 1400), expand = c(0, 0)) +
  coord_radial(theta = "y", end = 1.5 * pi, inner.radius = 0.15, expand = FALSE) +
  guides(r = "none") +
  labs(title = "China and India dwarf all others",
       subtitle = "Ten most populous countries in 2007, in millions",
       x = NULL, y = NULL,
       caption = "Data: Gapminder, via the gapminder R package") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "x", arrows = "")

Sources (15)

27 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 5 books

Show the 15 sources

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/radial-bar-chart.html

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

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

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