Reorder bars in geom_bar ggplot2 by value

Question

I am trying to make a bar-plot where the plot is ordered from the miRNA with the highest value to the miRNA with the lowest. Why does my code not work?

> head(corr.m)

        miRNA         variable value
1    mmu-miR-532-3p      pos     7
2    mmu-miR-1983        pos    75
3    mmu-miR-301a-3p     pos    70
4    mmu-miR-96-5p       pos     5
5    mmu-miR-139-5p      pos    10
6    mmu-miR-5097        pos    47

ggplot(corr.m, aes(x=reorder(miRNA, value), y=value, fill=variable)) + 
  geom_bar(stat="identity")

Answer 1

Your code works fine, except that the barplot is ordered from low to high. When you want to order the bars from high to low, you will have to add a -sign before value:

ggplot(corr.m, aes(x = reorder(miRNA, -value), y = value, fill = variable)) + 
  geom_bar(stat = "identity")

which gives:

---

Used data:

corr.m <- structure(list(miRNA = structure(c(5L, 2L, 3L, 6L, 1L, 4L), .Label = c("mmu-miR-139-5p", "mmu-miR-1983", "mmu-miR-301a-3p", "mmu-miR-5097", "mmu-miR-532-3p", "mmu-miR-96-5p"), class = "factor"),
                         variable = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L), .Label = "pos", class = "factor"),
                         value = c(7L, 75L, 70L, 5L, 10L, 47L)),
                    class = "data.frame", row.names = c("1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6"))

Answer 2

Aside from what @Jaap answered, there are two other ways to order the plot:

1: By using desc argument for value:

ggplot(corr.m, aes(x = reorder(miRNA, desc(value)), y = value, fill = variable)) + 
   geom_bar(stat = "identity")

2: By releveling the miRNA factor and omitting reorder argument:

corr.m %>%
   arrange(desc(value)) %>%
   mutate(miRNA = factor(miRNA, levels = unique(miRNA))) %>% 
ggplot(aes(x = miRNA, y = value, fill = variable)) + 
   geom_bar(stat = "identity")