# An alternative to copy-paste reporting
## Create dynamic, submission-ready, APA-style manuscripts in R with papaja
**Frederik Aust, Marius Barth**<br/>
*University of Cologne, Germany*
---
When reporting quantitative results, psychologist routinely engage in copy-paste reporting: Statistical results are copied from the output of an analysis software and pasted into a word processor. Copy-paste reporting is tedious. If the analytic approach changes during manuscript preparation or revision, copy-pasting starts anew. More importantly, copy-paste reporting is error-prone. A substantial number of published journal articles report inconsistent statistics (Brown & Heathers, 2016; Nuijten et al., 2016; Petrocelli, Clarkson, Whitmire, & Moon, 2013). Moreover, even with the original data in hand, reported results are often difficult and sometimes impossible to reproduce (Eubank, 2016; Hardwicke et al., 2018; Stodden, Seiler, & Ma, 2018). Dynamic documents are a time-saving, fault-preventing alternative to copy-paste reporting. By fusing manuscript and analysis scripts, dynamic documents automate reporting of results, ensure that the reported statistics are consistent, and facilitate documentation and reproduction of analyses. In this hands-on workshop I provide a primer on preparing dynamic, submission-ready, APA-style manuscripts with the R package papaja. Participants will learn how to automate reporting of statistics including tables and plots. Basic prior knowledge of R is required.
---
# Course outline
This workshop will cover the following issues.
### Conceptual introduction
- The challenge of computational reproducibility
- A partial solution: Dynamic documents
### Tutorial
- Introduction to `knitr` and `rmarkdown`
- Document structure
- Writing prose using Markdown syntax
- Including R code
- Troubleshooting & best practices
- Introduction to `papaja`
- Scope of the package
- Reporting results of statistical analyses
- Creating and referencing tables and figures
- Citations in R Markdown
---
# Preparations
To make the most of our time, we recommend that you prepare for the workshop by meeting the following requirements.
### Software requirements
To enable `papaja`'s full set of features you need either an up-to-date version of [RStudio](http://www.rstudio.com/) or [pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) and a [TeX](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX) distribution.
If you have no use for TeX beyond rendering R Markdown documents, I recommend you use [TinyTex](https://yihui.name/tinytex/).
TinyTex can be installed from within R as follows.
```r
if(!"tinytex" %in% rownames(installed.packages())) install.packages("tinytex")
tinytex::install_tinytex()
```
Please refer to the [`papaja` manual](https://crsh.github.io/papaja_man/introduction.html#getting-started) for detailed installation instructions.
#### Installing `papaja`
`papaja` is not yet available on CRAN but you can install it from its GitHub repository:
```r
# Install devtools package if necessary
if(!"devtools" %in% rownames(installed.packages())) install.packages("devtools")
# Install the latest development snapshot from GitHub
devtools::install_github("crsh/papaja@devel")
```
---
Workshop outline for *An alternative to copy-paste reporting: Create dynamic, submission-ready, APA-style manuscripts in R with papaja*, ECVP 2019, KU Leuven, 25.08.2019.
Frederik Aust ([frederik.aust@uni-koeln.de](mailto:frederik.aust@uni-koeln.de), [\@frederikaust](http://twitter.com/frederikaust)) & Marius Barth ([marius.barth@uni-koeln.de](mailto:marius.barth@uni-koeln.de), [\@mariuswbarth](http://twitter.com/mariuswbarth))
