Overview

In addition to benefiting reproducibility and transparency, one of the advantages of using R is that researchers have a much larger range of fully customisable data visualisations options. These options not only look attractive, but can increase transparency about the distribution of the underlying data rather than relying on commonly used visualisations of aggregations such as bar charts of means.

In this tutorial, we provide a practical introduction to data visualisation using R, specifically aimed at researchers who have little to no prior experience of using R. First we provide a brief overview of general data visualisation principles and the ggplot2 package for data visualisation. The tutorial then walks you through four different types of plots: bar charts, scatterplots, violin-boxplots and lineplots for time series data.