The analysistemplates package

The RStudio projects of your colleagues all have a different structure? It is difficult to navigate and understand others' projects? Or even your own project from a few months/years ago? Therefore, it is useful if you all agree on a standard folder structure for your analysis. Templates can help to enforce this. Currently, this package provides one standard data analysis template for RStudio projects geared towards scientific use cases. Whenever you start a new project in RStudio, this package provides the standard folder structure directly in your code editor. Also, it can help you improving reproducibility by using git and renv.

Installation

remotes::install_github("jonas-hag/analysistemplates")

Usage

To create a new project with the folder structure shown below, follow these steps:

1. Install the package

2. Restart RStudio

3. When creating a new RStudio project with the "New directory" option, choose "Standard analysis template"

   

4. During initialization you can select if a folder called 06_Analysis_for_publication is included (check "Include Analysis for publication folder")

5. You can select if you want to generate a .gitignore file (check "Create a .gitignore file")

6. You can select if you want to use renv (check "Use renv with this project")

7. Once you've created the project, you will be provided with the instructions how to create a git repository for your project and connect to github/gitlab

Template overview

A new project contains the following folder structure:

|-- 01_Data
|   |-- 01_Raw
|   `-- 02_Clean
|-- 02_Analysis
|   |-- 01_Scripts
|   |-- 02_Results
|   |-- 03_Figures
|   `-- 04_Tables
|-- 03_Manuscript
|   |-- 01_Text
|   `-- 02_Final_figures
|-- 04_Presentation
|-- 05_Misc
|-- 06_Analysis_for_publication <-- optional
|   |-- 01_Scripts              <-- optional
|   |-- 02_Results              <-- optional
|   |-- 03_Figures              <-- optional
|   `-- 04_Tables               <-- optional
|-- README.md
|-- .gitignore                  <-- optional
|-- renv                        <-- optional

Planned features

• better integration with git/github

I want a different template

You can easily create your own template. Fork this repo and create a new pair of <my_template>.R and <my_template>.dcf files. <my_template>.dcf defines how your template is named and which options are shown when you select the template in the project wizard. <my_template>.R defines what happens when the template is used. Have a look at standard_analysis.R and standard_analysis.dcf for inspiration or check out the RStudio Extensions documentation.