Rproject templates to automate and standardize your workflow

rstudio::conf 2020 lightning talks

Caroline Ledbetter

February 4, 2020

Many teams and organizations have tasks and structures that are standard across projects. Lack of consistency and documentation can lead to lost productivity when team members join collaborations or previous work is consulted by your future self. Setting up folder structures can be particularly tedious. This talk will demonstrate using Rstudio project templates as part of an organizational package to automatically setup file structures, establish git repositories and add standardized readme files. It will also show how including report templates for Rmarkdown files can lead to more consistent and professional reports. Project info can be optionally stored so that project information can be easily added automatically to the top of reports and included in snippets for code file headers. Creating standard, easy to implement documentation and procedures can be particularly effective in encouraging skeptical collaborators to use git and Rmarkdown. Organizational packages can also be a great place to house functions that are specific and common to an organizations needs. The talk will showcase this functionality using the CIDAtools package that we developed. While the CIDAtools package was developed to address issues that sometimes arise from the less structured environment of academia, the tools presented can be equally useful in an industry setting.

A 5-minute presentation in our Lightning Talks series

About the speaker

Caroline Ledbetter

Caroline works as a collaborative biostatistician at the Center for Innovative Design and Analysis at the Colorado School of Public Health. She is an R enthusiast and a reproducible research evangelist. She specializes in research using electronic health record data. Caroline received her masters degree in public health from the Colorado School of Public Health.