F.5 Resources

This section provides pointers to additional resources related to R Markdown.

F.5.1 R Markdown documentation

R Markdown is being actively developed by Posit (formely RStudio). To keep track of changes, the site at https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com is a good starting point.

For more detailed instructions on R Markdown see:

Useful practical resources on R Markdown include (in increasing amount of detail):

  • A Markdown Quick Reference card is available in RStudio via
    Help > Markdown Quick Reference.

  • The R Markdown Cheatsheet, available in RStudio via
    Help > Cheatsheets > R Markdown Cheat Sheet.

R Markdown cheatsheet (from Posit cheatsheets).

Figure F.2: R Markdown cheatsheet (from Posit cheatsheets).

  • The R Markdown Reference Guide, available in RStudio via
    Help > Cheatsheets > R Markdown Reference Guide (see Figure (fig:cheat-70-rmarkdown-reference)).
R Markdown reference guide (from Posit cheatsheets).

Figure F.3: R Markdown reference guide (from Posit cheatsheets).

F.5.2 R Markdown for scientific writing

Scientific writing is highly regulated by conventions and formatting guidelines. Articles and theses in psychology typically need to conform to the manuscript guidelines of the American Psychological Association (aka. APA style), whereas other disciplines and journals have different needs and requirements. Many publishers now offer templates that allow authors to focus on content, rather than formatting.

Helpful resources for preparing journal articles in R Markdown include:

  • papaja is an R package for using R Markdown to write articles conforming to the APA manuscript guidelines (and works with the popular LaTeX document class apa6).

  • rticles is an R package that provides R Markdown templates for various journal articles and conference submissions.

References

Allaire, J., Xie, Y., Dervieux, C., McPherson, J., Luraschi, J., Ushey, K., … Iannone, R. (2024). rmarkdown: Dynamic documents for R. Retrieved from https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown
Knuth, D. E. (1984). Literate programming. The Computer Journal, 27(2), 97–111. https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/27.2.97
Xie, Y. (2015). Dynamic documents with R and knitr (2nd ed.). Retrieved from http://yihui.name/knitr/
Xie, Y. (2023). knitr: A general-purpose package for dynamic report generation in R. Retrieved from https://yihui.org/knitr/
Xie, Y., Allaire, J. J., & Grolemund, G. (2018). R Markdown: The definitive guide. Retrieved from https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/
Xie, Y., Dervieux, C., & Riederer, E. (2020). R markdown cookbook. Retrieved from https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/