For most people, I think it's fair to say, the proposed "Quilt Plot" is an example of a heat map.

c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/w... where there are examples that do not involve dendograms etc.

In either case, whether the columns and rows are ordered or not, it is my impression that such plots are widely used throughout the quantitative sciences.

With regard to R code, "Instant Heat Maps in R: How-To" by Sebastian Raschka (top of Google search for "heat map" in Books) describes in some detail how to construct heat maps ("Quilt plots") in R.

Fully understood. I wish I could have edited my comment, as it wasn't phrased clearly. What I was trying to ask was, "what am I missing here that made this worthy of publication in PLoS ONE ?"

If it's simply a heat map with clustering and dendrograms off - this is, I believe, an R issue. The heat map is the central part of the plot ( image(x) ), and in many other scientific computing packages ( Matlab, Python, ... ), that's all that will appear also.

Thank you for your quick response.

A heatmap is simply what you call a Quilt Plot: an array of colors that represent data, typically in a cartesian layout (but can also be hexagonal, etc.). Additional data can be overlaid or added, like dendograms, and the data can be clustered, sorted, etc. But the visualization is still a heatmap.

What you've done here is mistake the heatmap plus its extensions for the underlying idea, and then removed the extensions. But that doesn't mean there's anything new here. People have been doing this for decades in Excel, for example.

I don't see your discussion making this in any way worthy of a publication, even if you don't claim novelty. This has been accessible in all sorts of software and is easy enough to code up in any language.

This short paper was thought to offer utility to resource-poor users, and offered a simple application example. Both the academic editor (myself) and a reviewer raised concerns about the level of originality, and this issue was specifically referred back to the PLoS ONE Editorial office, where the decision to proceed was made.