Original Graph Replication

This is my replication of the tidytuesday graph from March 14, 2023 created by Jon Harmon on GitHub. It uses data from the European Medicines Agency via Miquel Anglada Girotto.

The original graph is very good: the two plots share a consistent theme, and they work together to tell a story about the evolution of orphan drugs over time.

p1 = ggplot(drugs, mapping = aes(x = orphan_medicine, fill = orphan_medicine)) + geom_bar() + scale_fill_manual(values = c("purple4", "gold")) + theme_minimal() + labs(title = "Approved orphan drugs (11.87%)", x = "orphan", y = "count") + theme(legend.position = "top")

p2 = ggplot(drugs, mapping = aes(x = marketing_authorisation_date, fill = orphan_medicine)) + geom_histogram(bins = 24, color = "white") + scale_fill_manual(values = c("purple4", "gold")) + theme_minimal() + labs(title = "Evolution of orphan drugs", x = "year", y = "count") + theme(legend.position = "none")

(p1 + p2)

New Graph

In class, we talked about how stacked bar charts can be difficult to read. I have swapped out the stacked bar chart for a side-by-side bar chart, which I think shows the changes in amounts of orphan and non-orphan drugs over the years. I also added alt text for both plots and switched the theme to grey so that the boundaries of the side-by-side plots were clearer.

#|fig-alt: Two graphs. The top graph is a histogram of orphan and non-orphan drugs: there are considerably more non-orphan drugs. The bottom graph is a side-by-side bar chart of orphan and non-orphan drugs created between 1998 and 2023. The amounts of both drugs have increased over time, but no orphan drugs are listed before 2014.
p1 = ggplot(drugs, mapping = aes(x = orphan_medicine, fill = orphan_medicine)) + 
  geom_bar() + 
  scale_fill_viridis_d() + 
  theme_grey() + 
  labs(title = "Approved orphan drugs (11.87%)", x = "orphan", y = "count") + 
  theme(legend.position = "top")

p2 = ggplot(drugs, mapping = aes(x = marketing_authorisation_date, fill = orphan_medicine)) + geom_histogram(bins = 24, color = "white") + 
  scale_fill_viridis_d() + theme_grey() + 
  facet_wrap(facets = "orphan_medicine") + 
  labs(title = "Evolution of orphan drugs", x = "year", y = "count") + 
  theme(legend.position = "none")
(p1/p2)