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ggplot2 theme for scientific publications

Zacharias Steinmetz

2024-10-17

Source: vignettes/theme_publish.Rmd
theme_publish.Rmd

Packages

First, load ggplot2 alongside envalysis.

Default theme

The following code chunk plots the ggplot2 mtcars sample data set with the default ggplot2 theme.

data("mtcars")

p <- ggplot(mtcars) +
  geom_point(aes(x = wt, y = mpg, color = factor(gear))) +
  labs(
    title = "Fuel economy declines as weight increases",
    subtitle = "(1973-74)",
    caption = "Data from the 1974 Motor Trend US magazine.",
    x = "Weight (1000 lbs)",
    y = "Fuel economy (mpg)",
    colour = "Gears"
  ) +
  facet_wrap( ~ am, labeller = labeller(am = c("0" = "Automatic",
                                               "1" = "Manual")))
p

theme_publish()

Adding theme_publish() applies the custom theme.

theme_publish() allows for changing the base font face, font size, and line widths. More arguments may be passed to ggplot2’s theme_bw()

p + theme_publish(base_size = 16, base_family = "Times", base_linewidth = 0.7)