Vorbereitung und Vorwort

Become a more efficient scientist and collaborate more easily with colleagues!
I really much appreciate what the RStudio Team and people like Yihui Xie are doing to push reproducible research and our all effiency working with R. And I would love if this book makes their accomplishments more accessible for students and every scientist, who is about to set up her or his next R project.

Why should I read this book?

  1. Fully dynamic reports: You have added some new observations? Don’t worry! All graphics, tables and values will have changed automatically after compiling the thesis again. You won’t have to copy results from your R console and paste it to your word or presentation processing program any longer, since
    1. R-Chunks allow you to insert tables and graphics using the R code you are familiar with.
    2. You can use inline R code directly in your thesis text, allowing you to have R output in your sentences. Just store a result in a variable and let R and Markdown print it’s value within a sentence.
  2. Be a good scientist! You are doing real reproducible research as we all should do1.
    1. Having a dynamic report means every single result you report is traceable, so your reader could see, where every specific value comes from.
    2. Everything, even the used R packages, are stored within one folder. So you can easily share the project and lastly it should compile correctly even some years in the future.
    3. Collaborate: Since your are manipulating plain text files, you can use your favorite version control system (e.g. your University’s GitLab) and collaborate easily with colleagues.

Contribute!

I put a lot of completely unpaid effort and time (since I’m a student hardcore procrastinating writing his thesis) into making this book and I give it to you for free, hoping it will save you a lot of time and make you a better or at least a more efficient researcher.

I though have one request for you: Everyone whom this book helped I want to invite to contribute to this project as ideas and resolutions, that would make this book continously better, come during actual thesis writing or while coding in R.

Maybe you simply want to say “Thank you!”. Whether my project saved you time worth 1,000EUR (because you are of the rare species of a well paid scientist) or you just grant me an after work beer, I would really appreciate your donation!2


Objective

This book and it’s corresponding R project shall become a great starting point for other student’s thesises and scientist’s statistical reports. It shall contain everything you usually need while writing a thesis (especially in Psychology) out of the box, so you can use/copy this R project folder whenever you start your next R project. Thoug it shall still be a minimal project and it shall not become another bookdown or R manual. Ferner und von einer nicht zu unterschätzenden Schwierigkeit (in Details wie Dezimaltrennzeichen etc.) soll dieses R-Projekt Abschlussarbeiten auf Deutsch ermöglichen.
See To be done if you want to help, but don’t know where to start.

As this book is written in order to prepare writing a thesis in German, you will be confronted with a mixture of languages.3 Feel free to translate and optimize this book, so it could become a great starting point for other student’s thesises.

tbd: Dieses Beispielbuch ist noch nicht voll funktionsfähig. Manches, was in HTML funktioniert, klappt noch nicht im PDF-Output. Manches davon ist eine Frage der korrekten LaTeX-Einstellungen, manches wird von bookdown und/oder pandoc nicht unterstützt. Eine Übersicht findet ihr unter To Be Done.

  1. I’d really wish publisher would reward this!↩

  2. Depending on the way your are reading this, you might visit https://kreflix.github.io/thesiswritingUsingRStudioAndBookdown/index.html#contribute to see how to donate.↩

  3. Auch mein Fließtext ist noch work in progress und ich springe zwischen direkter und indirekter Anrede, vllt auch zwischen den Anreden Du und Sie.↩