ggplot2 theme for scientific publications

Packages

First, load ggplot2 alongside envalysis.

library(envalysis)
library(ggplot2)

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.

p + theme_publish()

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)