The sciscales package provides convenient functions to convert ggplot2 axis labels, annotations, legend labels, etc. into formatted scientific notation. The output format is flexible, with several options included to allow customization of the formatted numbers.

You can install the development version of sciscales from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("christyray/sciscales")

ggplot2’s default formatting for large numbers is to print them plainly with no formatting, which can be hard to read or unsightly for very large numbers.

The scales package includes the label_scientific() function, which formats large numbers in the e+00 notation. This can be much clearer than plain numbers, but may not be the desired formatting for a polished figure.

The sciscales package includes the label_sci() function to convert large numbers into formatted scientific notation. The label_sci() function can be passed to the labels argument of a scale_*() function to auto-format the label numbers.

library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
library(sciscales)
library(patchwork)

p <- ggplot(economics, aes(x = date, y = pop)) +
  geom_line() +
  labs(x = "Date", y = "Population")

p_ggplot <- p + ggtitle("ggplot2")
p_scales <- p + scale_y_continuous(labels = label_scientific()) + ggtitle("scales")
p_sciscales <- p + scale_y_continuous(labels = label_sci()) + ggtitle("sciscales")

p_ggplot + p_scales + p_sciscales

Additional arguments to label_sci() allow more control over the appearance of the formatted numbers, such as whether to include trailing zeros:

p + scale_y_continuous(labels = label_sci(trailing = FALSE))