Violin- (colours) and box-plot (black) representations of the distributions of mass (left), length (middle), and linear mass (right) of Galactic LSFs. Following Zucker et al. (2018), IGLSFs are divided into Milky Way ‘bones’ (blue), GMFs (grey), Herschel filaments (magenta), minimum spanning tree (MST) filaments (yellow). IGLSFs identified from the Structure, Excitation, and Dynamics of the Inner Galactic InterStellar Medium (SEDIGISM, Schuller et al. 2017) survey data are in red (from Mattern et al. 2018b). OGLSFs, observed within our data, are in green. More information on IGLSFs are reported in Appendix B.2. The white circles show the median for each property and sub-sample. For comparison, the transparent violins show the measurements of Zhang et al. (2019) for the same category of structures, where the ‘x’ indicates the median of the samples.