Getting Started

First download the repository to your local machine. If you use Github, then this will mean cloning the repository into a new R project. If you are not a Github user, simply click ‘Download Zip’ and extract the file to a convenient location.

Repository Contents

The repository contains several folders and files. They are organized to keep data preparation and cleaning in one file, data-raw, analysis in another, analysis, and outputs from the analysis that will become tables and figures, and numbers in the text of the manuscript, analysis-output. The remaining files in the root directory are files related to the manuscript itself. Next, we’ll demonstrate how to link the raw data to the analysis to the output to the manuscript so that all the steps to generate the manuscript are automated and thus, not subject to the inconsistencies that go along with piece-wise data preparation and analysis.

+ analysis-output
    - results.rda
+ analysis
    - analysis.R
+ data-raw
    - fetch-raw-data.R
- gitignore
- README.md
- README.rmd
- bibliography.bib
- manuscript-example.Rmd
- manuscript-example.pdf
- research-project-template.Rproj
- simple.latex
- style-headers.md
- tablesandfigures-example.Rmd
- tablesandfigures-example.pdf

Generate the Manuscript with One Click

Open the manuscript-example.Rmd and tablesandfigures-examples.Rmd files in RStudio. Install the following packages, if they are not already installed:

install.packages(xtable)
install.packages(ggplot2)
install.packages(ggfortify)
install.packages(gridExtra)
install.packages(Quandl)
install.packages(RCurl)
install.packages(xts)
install.packages(urca)
install.packages(vars)

Click the ‘Knit PDF’ button on the code editing pane, and voila! A PDF of the manuscript should appear. In what follows we will walk through what is happening step by step.