Error bars on a line graph question?

Question

I want to show error bars on a line graph. Only, I don't want to do percentages type thing. The lines represent an average, and instead I was hoping to use a error bar for the highest and lowest values for that spacific series. Is this logical or even possible? Does this make sense?

Answer 1

It's acceptable as long as you say in the caption of the graph that the error bars delineate the range of all results. There are a number of ways to show error bars. Most people want their error bars to be as small as possible (it makes their work look more accurate) so they use standard error (preferably if they know they have normality in the data) or confidence intervals based on Student's T or Pearson's Chi-square, and I'm sure there's other methods. Even showing standard deviation would usually produce smaller error bars than your whole range of results. But it's up to you. Just be sure to explicitly state your methods.