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ReportMD --- Writing Complex Scientific Reports in R

Release: Build Status Development: Build Status

It is common for complex analyses to be carried out in R. To improve the reproducability of such analyses and provide the necessary documentation it is increasingly common to use literate programming techniques. Although R has had the ability to embed R code in long-form documents describing the analysis and presenting the results via Sweave, it has been the introduction of RMarkdown that has driven the increasing popularity of this approach. The relative simplicity of authoring Markdown documents and the ability to convert these into a large variety of output formats via pandoc combined with the tight integration with RStudio make this approach easy to use and powerful at the same time.

RStudio's support for RMarkdown templates and custom document formats has enabled the community to provide templates that are tailored towards specific use cases and integrate well with RStudio. The document format provided by reportMD was inspired by, and is in part based on, knitrBootstrap.

Unlike currently available tools used to facilitate this literate programming approach to data analysis reportMD focuses specifically on complex data analyses that may not be well suited to the monolithic document format typical of RMarkdown. Complex analysis are best split into smaller units but are likely to depend on the results of earlier stages of the analysis. This R package aims to provide a number of features to support analyses that are split across multiple RMarkdown files with cross-file dependencies and enables multi-page HTML output.

An example of a report generated with reportMD is available online.

Installation

To install reportMD and some of the dependancies requires devtools. Users of RStudio will already have this installed, otherwise install.packages('devtools') will take care of that.

The latest version of reportMD can be installed:

devtools::install_github('humburg/reportMD')

Getting started

The Multi-document Rmarkdown template included in this package has detailed instructions and examples. In RStudio select

File > New File > R Markdown > From Template > Multi-part Report {reportMD}

This will create a copy of the template in the current project. Open the file skeleton.Rmd and click on RStudio's Knit button to compile the template into a webpage.

Alternatively the template is available as part of the installed R package and can be located via the R command system.file('rmarkdown/templates/multipart_report/skeleton', package="reportMD").

Features

Current and planned features include:

  • Ability to declare required RMarkdown documents in yaml header;
    • Dependencies are resolved and rendered to the requested output format when the parent document is rendered.
    • Make declared dependencies available as reference links so that links to these documents can easily inserted into the text using Markdown syntax.
  • Ability to automatically load the results of cached chunks from other other documents;
  • Avoid recompiling child documents whenever possible;
  • Providing a shorthand to include figures and tables generated by other documents;
  • Automatic numbering of figures and tables
    • within each document.
    • across linked documents.