BioVisReport: A Markdown-based lightweight website builder for reproducible and interactive visualization of results from peer-reviewed publications

• Published in: Computational and structural biotechnology journal 2022-01, Vol.20, p.3133-3139
• Main Authors: Yang, Jingcheng, Liu, Yaqing, Shang, Jun, Huang, Yechao, Yu, Ying, Li, Zhihui, Shi, Leming, Ran, Zihan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Interactive visualization; Peer-reviewed publications; Reproducibility; Website builder
• ISSN: 2001-0370; 2001-0370
• DOI: 10.1016/j.csbj.2022.06.009

[Display omitted] Interactive visualization is an effective way to promote the reproducibility of results presented in biomedical publications and to facilitate additional exploration of the reported data. However, there is a lack of convenient tools that balance reproducibility with ease of use. To address this problem, we develop BioVisReport, a lightweight solution for the rapid generation of an interactive website based on a user-defined Markdown file, which acts as a text markup language without requiring users to master complex syntax and allows them to preview the results in real-time. Interactive websites generated by the tool can help readers conveniently reproduce research findings and perform further in-depth analyses beyond those reported in the original peer-reviewed publications. Currently, BioVisReport offers 17 basic types of plots for visualizing published data. In addition, the extensibility of BioVisReport supports flexible integration of user-developed Python plugins with multiple programming languages. BioVisReport is freely available at https://biovis.report/.