R – How to change the formatting of numbers on an axis with ggplot

ggplot2r

I'm using R and ggplot to draw a scatterplot of some data, all is fine except that the numbers on the y-axis are coming out with computer style exponent formatting, i.e. 4e+05, 5e+05, etc. This is unacceptable to me, so I want to get it to display them as 500,000, 400,000, and so on. Getting a proper exponent notation would also be acceptable.

The code for the plot is as follows:

p <- ggplot(valids, aes(x=Test, y=Values)) +
  geom_point(position="jitter") +
  facet_grid(. ~ Facet) +
  scale_y_continuous(name="Fluorescent intensity/arbitrary units") +
  scale_x_discrete(name="Test repeat") +
  stat_summary(fun.ymin=median, fun.ymax=median, fun.y=median, geom="crossbar")

Any help much appreciated.

Best Answer

Another option is to format your axis tick labels with commas is by using the package scales, and add

 scale_y_continuous(name="Fluorescent intensity/arbitrary units", labels = comma)

to your ggplot statement.

If you don't want to load the package, use:

scale_y_continuous(name="Fluorescent intensity/arbitrary units", labels = scales::comma)
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