Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) has seen an increase in popularity as a method for studying the human brain. This approach is dependent on voxel localization and spectral quality, knowledge of which are essential for judging the validity and robustness of any analysis. As such, visualization plays a central role in appropriately communicating MRS studies. The quality of data visualization has been shown to be poor in a number of biomedical fields and so we sought to appraise this in MRS papers. To do this, we conducted a survey of the psychiatric single-voxel MRS literature. This revealed a generally low standard, with a significant proportion of papers not providing the voxel location and spectral quality information required to judge their validity or replicate the experiment. Based on this, we then present a series of suggestions for a minimal standard for MRS data visualization. The primary point of these is that both voxel location and MRS spectra be presented from all participants. Participant group membership should be indicated where more than one is included in the experiment (e.g. patients and controls). A set of suggested figure layouts that fulfil these requirements are presented with sample code provided to produce these (github.com/nwd2918/MRS-voxel-plot).

磁共振波谱（MRS）作为研究人脑的一种方法已经普及。此方法取决于体素定位和光谱质量，其知识对于判断任何分析的有效性和鲁棒性至关重要。因此，可视化在适当传达MRS研究中起着核心作用。在许多生物医学领域中，数据可视化的质量都很差，因此我们试图在MRS论文中对此进行评估。为此，我们对精神病性单体素MRS文献进行了调查。这表明标准较低，大量论文未提供判断其有效性或重复实验所需的体素位置和光谱质量信息。基于此，然后，我们针对MRS数据可视化的最低标准提出了一系列建议。这些主要要点是，所有参与者都应同时显示体素位置和MRS光谱。如果实验中包括多个参与者（例如患者和对照组），则应指明参与者的成员资格。提供了一组满足这些要求的建议的图形布局，并提供了生成这些图形的示例代码（github.com/nwd2918/MRS-voxel-plot）。