Pleodimensionalism

Index date: 2022-11-01

Last modified: 2023-07-23

Meaning “the doctrine of more dimensions”, pleodimensionalism is a call to always look beyond the current practice around data, numbers, and statistics, and to ask what additional information may be useful when communicating results. Too often research publications (be they scientific, governmental, or otherwise) rely on single numbers for effect size estimates and trend lines. However, all numbers are drawn from some distribution, and these distributions are rarely normal. As research communicators, we should seek to describe the full shape of the distributions which underpin our results.