6 thoughts on “Data Thief”

1. My colleagues have used this before (a couple years ago, things might have changed). While it does a fair job, they found that there were a couple journals whose graphic design department didn't necessarily stick to the scales as strictly as they should have, rendering the results of the software useless. Not its fault, but a problem with trying to extract data from graphs via any method.

2. A free alternative is engauge, but it doesn't seem to have as many features as data thief.

3. also g3data (free, and apt-get'able if you run Ubuntu)

4. I've always used ImageJ for this sort of thing, i.e., extracting data from column and scatter plots. It's not that useful for recent papers where data are often (thankfully!) published online as supplemental online information, but this approach is really useful for producing meta-analyses that require extracting data from old manuscripts.

5. @Ben Bolker: I'm getting 404 errors on that g3data link.

   http://www.frantz.fi/software/g3data.php seems to work, although I haven't attempted to download it. There's this note: "g3data is distributed as a part of Fedora starting from 7, thus I will no longer supply standalone rpms."

6. Yes, sorry, the URL got mangled.

   g3data is part of the Fedora repositories,
   and of the Debian repositories. There is also
   a Windows binary link on that page.

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