Should we trust graphs' default settings in the R packages?

摘要

Nowadays, we cannot imagine conducting analysis and creating any graph without support of various computer programs. They make researchers’ work easier. No matter how good their computer skills are, it is always nice to have some help, and that is what default settings usually are for. It is believed that using default settings of graphical software, one should not worry about choice of graph settings. But is it actually true? Perhaps researchers are putting too much trust in default settings? In this article, we will try to show that default settings are not always as helpful as it seems. We will demonstrate this with examples of three packages in R: graphics, lattice and ggplot2.