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Categorizing and Ranking Graphs in the American Economic Review Over the Last Century

How do economists use graphs, and do readers perceive them to be used well? Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I provide evidence to these questions by exploring more than 2,600 graphs published in the first volume of the American Economic Review from 1911 to 2017. I find that economists use a lot of line charts—more than 80% of the total sample are line charts. I also find that the share of graphs that use data (as opposed to diagrams) fell over the first half of the century and then increased from about the early 1980s to today, correlated with perceived graph quality.