Getting Started with Sweave: R, LaTeX, Eclipse, StatET, & TeXlipse

Being able to press a single button that runs all your statistical analyses and integrates the output into your final report is a beautiful thing. If you have not already heard, this is what Sweave can do for you. However, getting your computer to run Sweave can be a little bit fiddly. Thus, this post: (1) sets out the benefits of Sweave; (2) sets out how to install and configure R, Sweave, and Eclipse on Windows; (3) lists resources for people wanting to learn more about how to use LaTeX and Sweave; and (4) lists some specific resources relevant to researchers in psychology wanting to use these tools.

Tips for Writing Up Research in Psychology

This post provides a list of links on writing in psychology with a particular emphasis on writing results sections.

Formatting a Table in Word | R to Tab-Delimited to APA Style

The following post sets out my procedure for importing a tab-delimited table of data produced in R  into Microsoft Word and formatting it.

Grammar of Tables | Tables for Results Sections - Journal Articles and Theses

This post discusses ways of thinking about tables. What is the basic conceptual structure of a table? What are the implications of this conceptual structure for communicating with tables? How can this improve the quality of results presented in journal articles and theses?

Linking text, results, and analyses: Increasing transparency and efficiency

I have recently been thinking about the relationship between text in a final report and data analysis. The broader concern is with making the conduct and reporting of statistical analyses more transparent. I am inspired by the ideas of literate programming, Sweave, and open access to data.

Something to aspire to:

• Raw data is shared  (ethics, copyright, and other considerations permitting). 
• Code is shared that shows how the data was imported, transformed, and analysed. This code is well written, commented, and documented.
• The report is shared as opposed to requiring a paid subscription.
• Report output including tables, figures, and some text is linked directly to the analyses in code.

While the aspirations transcend R, I like the prospect of having analyses in R integrated with a final report. The inclusion of tables and figures , at least conceptually is a straightforward idea. However, the inclusion of text in a results section is a little fuzzier. Surely, text in a results section (I'll call it "results text" for short) varies in how it relates to actual analyses. Thus, I had the following questions: 1) What is the unit of results text? 2) How does results text vary and what should be automatically supplied by R?; 3) For results text that should not be supplied by R, how should it be integrated into an analysis process?

Initial thoughts: After a little reflection I had the following thoughts:

Introduction to Journal Article Deconstruction

One of the most powerful strategies that I use to learn how to write journal articles is to consciously study the writing conventions of good journal articles. I often want to communicate this strategy to other researchers who are battling the process of writing research. This is particularly the case with results sections. Thus, I plan to post various case studies using this approach to demonstrate how it works. Perhaps the principles generated from the deconstruction will also be relevant to others. I'll post all such instances with the label Article Deconstruction.

Formatting Correlation Matrices in Psychology

Researchers in psychology often want to present a correlation matrix of the main variables in a study. This post sets out one way of producing a formatted correlation matrix that conforms to APA style.