Rainbow colour maps remain widely used in the geosciences

This dataset is the result of a systematic survey to investigate the extent to which rainbow colour maps are used in geoscience publications. The collection method and results are described in Westaway, R. M. (2022) 'GC Insights: Rainbow colour maps remain widely used in the geosciences'. Geoscience Communication, 5, 83–86, https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-5-83-2022. Papers were surveyed from five journals - Earth System Dynamics (ESD), Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), Ocean Science (OS), Solid Earth (SE) and The Cryosphere (TC) - for the years 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020. The final data set includes the pre-existing Stoelzle and Stein (2021) survey data for HESS, which is independently available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5145746 (Stoelzle, 2021). All papers (n=2638) were classified according to the type of colour encoding used. year = year of publication (YYYY)title = full paper titleauthors = list of authors seperated by semi-colonn_authors = number of authorscol_code = color-issue classification (see below)volume = Journal volumestart_page = first page of paper (where available)end_page = last page of paper (where available)base_url = url to access the paper on the journal website filename = file name of the PDF version of the paper Color classification is stored in the col_code variable with: 0 = Colour visualisations with no colour issues1 = At least one visualisation with red-green issues2 = At least one visualisation with a rainbow colour mapbw = Black and white paper