r plot of NIH grantee data

Hello!

I am an R beginner and really enjoying it. I was hoping to create a plot of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to research anizations in Massachusetts.

Everything works except for one thing -- my plot keeps getting ordered alphabetically by the anization's name, not by the total value of the grants received. Here's the code I'm using -- what am I doing wrong?

#let's filter out grants under $3M
mass_nih_big_grants <- filter(mass_NIH_data_2023_desc, TOTAL_COST >= 3000000) 

# let's group them by anization. 
# many anizations have more than 1 NIH grant, we want to see the total value
# of grants to an anization. 

mass_nih_big_grantees <- mass_nih_big_grants %>%
  group_by(ORG_NAME) 

# let's put that in descending order before we plot it
mass_nih_big_grantees_desc <- mass_nih_big_grantees[order(-mass_nih_big_grantees$TOTAL_COST),]
 
# do we have to group them again? 
mass_nih_big_grantees_desc %>% 
  group_by(ORG_NAME)
  
# let's plot what we've got. 
plot_mass_nih_big_grantees_desc <- ggplot(mass_nih_big_grantees_desc, aes(x=ORG_NAME, y=TOTAL_COST)) +
  geom_bar(stat="identity", fill="dodgerblue") +
  coord_flip()
  
plot_mass_nih_big_grantees_desc + theme_light()  
# this works; it creates a plot but rearder is not working. It's sorting
# by  name descending (so, Z-A). 

r plot of NIH grantee data

Hello!

I am an R beginner and really enjoying it. I was hoping to create a plot of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to research anizations in Massachusetts.

Everything works except for one thing -- my plot keeps getting ordered alphabetically by the anization's name, not by the total value of the grants received. Here's the code I'm using -- what am I doing wrong?

#let's filter out grants under $3M
mass_nih_big_grants <- filter(mass_NIH_data_2023_desc, TOTAL_COST >= 3000000) 

# let's group them by anization. 
# many anizations have more than 1 NIH grant, we want to see the total value
# of grants to an anization. 

mass_nih_big_grantees <- mass_nih_big_grants %>%
  group_by(ORG_NAME) 

# let's put that in descending order before we plot it
mass_nih_big_grantees_desc <- mass_nih_big_grantees[order(-mass_nih_big_grantees$TOTAL_COST),]
 
# do we have to group them again? 
mass_nih_big_grantees_desc %>% 
  group_by(ORG_NAME)
  
# let's plot what we've got. 
plot_mass_nih_big_grantees_desc <- ggplot(mass_nih_big_grantees_desc, aes(x=ORG_NAME, y=TOTAL_COST)) +
  geom_bar(stat="identity", fill="dodgerblue") +
  coord_flip()
  
plot_mass_nih_big_grantees_desc + theme_light()  
# this works; it creates a plot but rearder is not working. It's sorting
# by  name descending (so, Z-A). 

• r
• ggplot2

1 Answer 1

Reordering the data will not reorder the plot and group_by() is for grouping data during summary calculations. The plot will be ordered by the order of the factor on the x axis. The default is ordering alphabetically, but you can either manually set the order using the levels parameter of the factor function or you can use the fct_reorder() function from forcats to order the factor according to the value of a function. The default function for ordering is the median, which works if the data are already summarized. Compare these two plots where I reorder the factor in the second case.

library(forcats)
library(ggplot2)
DF <- data.frame(Org = c("A","C","B"), Cost = c(4,3,6))
ggplot(DF, aes(x = Org, y = Cost)) + geom_col()

#Now reorder the Org by the Cost
ggplot(DF, aes(x = fct_reorder(Org, Cost), y = Cost)) + geom_col()

^{Created on 2024-11-16 with reprex v2.1.1}