R Markdown senior thesis template

“Science is reportedly in the middle of a reproducibility crisis.” This is the claim of quite a few these days including an article from ROpenSci which directly references another article by The Conversation. But what is “reproducible research” and how can statistical tools be used to help facilitate it?

I agree with Roger Peng and the folks behind Coursera's massively popular Data Science Specialization and the front page of their Reproducible Research course on their definition of “reproducible research”:

Reproducible research is the idea that data analyses, and more generally, scientific claims, are published with their data and software code so that others may verify the findings and build upon them. The need for reproducibility is increasing dramatically as data analyses become more complex, involving larger datasets and more sophisticated computations. Reproducibility allows for people to focus on the actual content of a data analysis, rather than on superficial details reported in a written summary. In addition, reproducibility makes an analysis more useful to others because the data and code that actually conducted the analysis are available.

One of the current goals at Reed is for students to be engaged in the research process earlier on in their academic careers in order to make their senior thesis experience more meaningful and rewarding. The collecting and analysis of data has been a challenging part of this process in the past for students. Additionally, updating statistical analyses, plots, and bibliographies as advisors request has sometimes been time consuming and frustrating.

So how does this tie into the reproducible research concept? As more and more students use R Markdown while taking courses at Reed (Chem 101/102, Mathematics 141, Mathematics 243, and Bio 101/102 next year!), it became clear that an option to use R Markdown while generating the senior thesis document should be available. The simplicity of Markdown commands improves readability and documentation, which make it a great thesis writing environment. R Markdown provides a wonderful environment to publish data and software code along with text and commentary and, in my opinion, is the best software currently available for writing journal articles, homework assignments, AND senior theses….reproducible senior theses!

What I'll be discussing in this blog post is a template I've created using R Markdown for Reed College senior theses. This template derives a lot of the features of the current LaTeX template (in fact it directly calls this template) so you can expect many of the great things from that including automatic creation of figure and table numbers, a table of contents, easy addition of beautiful plots and graphics, and the use of bibiolography style files. (Do you really want to have to memorize what APA or MLA looks like?…No!) In addition, you won't need to learn LaTeX. I've done the hard work of getting all that set up. You only need to learn Markdown. (Don't worry. That's really not hard!)

Markdown

Markdown allows you to write in an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, which then converts to a variety of different formats. R Markdown, which is really just Markdown with the ability to add in R code and output directly, allows you to produce HTML, PDF, and even Word documents based on only one Markdown file! The sky is the limit for Markdown!

The thesis template will automatically convert the Markdown code you type to LaTeX code which will then produce a PDF document. Again, I've done the hard work of getting this Markdown code to produce the correct output. If you'd like to check out the current version of this PDF, it is available on Google Drive here.

Now, back to Markdown basics. You can find a lot more information on Markdown here and an interactive tutorial here. You'll get used to it before you know it. Probably in less than an hour!

Install the template generating package

After you've stepped through the basics of Markdown, it's time to check out this template for yourself. Make sure you have RStudio and LaTeX installed and then direct your browser to the GitHub page for the template: http://github.com/ismayc/rticles. You'll see instructions there in the README.md file near the bottom of the page on installing the template package and getting the template running. As you see there, you'll want to install the rticles package via the following commands in the RStudio console:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("ismayc/rticles")

This allows for Reed Senior Thesis to be an option when you create a new R Markdown file via the File -> New File -> R Markdown dialog. You can specify the name you would like to give the file and also the location where you'd like the template and its files to be stored. I've called it “MyReedThesis” in what follows. After hitting the OK button, you'll see an Rmd file load up onto your RStudio window. (It will be called the same thing as what you specified in the previous step.)

If you click on the folder you've just created in the Files tab in RStudio, you can see a lot of files that have been created to assist you. You will see Rmd files for the abstract, bibliography, different chapters, conclusion, and your main Rmd file (MyReedThesis.Rmd for me). You also see folders that hold your bibliography database files (bib), bibliography style files (csl), data files (data), and images (figure). You'll find that I've preloaded a bibliography database file (thesis.bib), an American Psychological Association (APA) style file (apa.csl) from the Zotero Style Repository, a dataset derived from departing flights from Seattle and Portland in 2014 (flights.csv), and a couple figures in the figure folder.

If you click on the Knit button near the top of the RStudio window on your main Rmd file, a PDF linking together all of the files will be created. I've tried to show you how to do a variety of things in this Markdown template including

In the Introduction

• Creating a different headers including a chapter using the # syntax, a section using ##, a subsection using ###, etc.
• Bolding of text by surrounding the text in ** or __
• Adding a comment using the <!-- and --> syntax

In Chapter 1

• Easily creating numbered or non-numbered lists
• Using whitespace to create a new paragraph in your output
• Including R code in chunks to be added into your document
• Specifying different chunk options to tweak the output
• Using inline R code for calculations and directly referring to R results in the text of your document
• Including plots created in R
• Creating tables based on data stored in R
• Creating hyperlinks to web resources

In Chapter 2

• Including mathematical equations
• Using LaTeX to create chemical reaction equations
• Adding other discipline specific content to your theses

In Chapter 3

• Creating tables using Pandoc
• Labelling and referencing tables and figures (both created in R and stored in files) using custom R functions I created
• Adding footnotes into your document
• Developing bibliography database files using Zotero (highly recommended) or other programs like BibDesk

In the Conclusion

• Making a few tweaks to how chapters are displayed
• Creating appendices if desired

Lastly, in the bibliography.Rmd file, you'll find ways to currently fix the hanging indent issue with some citation styles. (You might need to delete a few lines if your style doesn't require hanging indents.) I also provide a way to cite sources in your bibliography at the end of the document that you don't directly cite throughout your thesis here.

The main driver R Markdown file

If you go back to the main Rmd file that is open, you'll see a lot of text that is commented out. This provides more information about what is happening in this file. In summary, this file links all of the chapter files together and creates a way to input the preliminaries (the abstract, the preface, etc.) as either inline text at the top of the document or in a file stored like abstract.Rmd. You'll also change your name, your advisor's name, and other metadata here. One last thing: lot stands for “List of Tables” and lof stands for “List of Figures.” These are automatically created when you include a table or a figure into your theses.

Currently, everything links throughout the document as well. When you make a reference to Figure 3.1 in Chapter 2, you can click on that link in the PDF and it will go directly to that figure. Chapters and sections are also linked in this same fashion.

There will be slight modifications (hopefully only slight if any at all!) occurring to this document as students and faculty test it throughout this year. I highly recommend running devtools::install_github("ismayc/rticles") and creating a new template from time to time to make sure you have the latest version of the template. You can easily copy your files into the new template as needed. (Some of the changes may occur to LaTeX files that you won't directly access.)

I'm hopeful that this template will be of great use to seniors throughout Reed College this year and in years to come. Science majors may get the most immediate benefit, but I believe that Markdown is an incredible valuable language to learn. It's easy and extremely flexible in the type of output it can produce. I've written this template to be as user friendly as possible and I hope that non-science majors will consider using it! If you have any questions, feedback, or would like to report any issues, please email me.

(The generating R Markdown file for this HTML document—saved in the .Rmd extension—is available here.)