Key variables come first! How best to design a correlation table when there is one key variable

Abstract

In many sciences, the relationships among the variables in multivariate data sets are often explored by means of correlation tables. In such studies there is often only one key variable of interest, for example, grain yield for cereals in agriculture, and class-size and academic performance in education. However, in such instances, there are no particular rules concerning how best to present the order of the variables in the resulting correlation matrices, even though it might be sensible to order them so that the focus is on the key variable. In this note, we show how this can be done.