The Bee Swarm Plot, an Alternative to Stripchart

The bee swarm plot is a one-dimensional scatter plot like "stripchart", but with closely-packed, non-overlapping points.

beeswarm

An R package implementing bee swarm plots

You can see some examples here: http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/~eklund/beeswarm/

Installation

You can install the latest release on CRAN like this:

install.packages("beeswarm")

Or you can install the latest development version from GitHub like this:

## install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("aroneklund/beeswarm")

Related works

• ggbeeswarm bee swarm and related plots in the ggplot2 framework
• pybeeswarm bee swarm plots in Python

It's also known as a dot plot

Leland Wilkinson (1999). Dot plots. The American Statistician. 53(3):276-281. PDF

It seems to be the same basic point layout algorithm, except that Wilkinson suggests an additional smoothing step that the beeswarm package does not do.