[1] "HOLA"
Producing high-quality documents and reports is of paramount importance.
Methods courses’ assignments are especially tricky as you have to combine plain text, code, and results.
Even if you are not minoring in methods, you must take a few statistics courses along your doctoral journey.
In general, instructors will expect to see, say, a table with regression coefficients and other statistics. You must also discuss your data, methods, and findings.
OK. You will then look for a text editor. Microsoft Word or Google Docs may be your immediate options.
So, you create a new document, write some paragraphs about the research design, and insert screenshots of the relevant figures and tables.
Screenshots, however, do not look very professional…
To make things worse, instructors will also want to see code. Technical questions will be asked. How did you wrangle the data? How did you fit the models?
Therefore, you must showcase your code.
Once again, you might be tempted to take screenshots of RStudio and insert them into the document.
Screenshots, however, do not look very professional…
We need better solutions for scientific writing than Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
A model Quarto document
Luckily, we have Quarto!
Quarto is an open-source tool for scientific publishing. Quarto documents can combine plain text, code, and code output. No need for screenshots!
Quarto documents can be rendered to multiple formats, including PDF, which makes them great for assignments.
You can create Quarto documents in RStudio by clicking File > New File > Quarto Document.
Thus, RStudio will open a Quarto document where you can write, program, and render to a professionally-looking PDF document.
You will see YAML metadata at the top of the Quarto document that you can modify at will. This metadata provides a lot of room for customization.
To make things easier, I have granted you access to a GitHub repository with a model Quarto document ready to be rendered into PDF format. Feel free to use this repository as a model for your grad school work.
Notice that the repository follows the guidelines for working directory organization that I listed in another blog post.
As you will see in the model repository, cool things about Quarto include printing code and code output, including references, and inserting \(\LaTeX\) math.
R vs Python? Why not both!
You can even combine R and Python chunks! Have a look:
Install package
You must install and load the reticulate package prior to running Python code: library(reticulate).
Furthermore, you can call objects from an R environment while programming in a Python chunk, and vice-versa, which means that you can build “bilingual” workflows:
In Quarto, you can switch between R and Python, making the most of both languages. This feature is truly awesome! It dramatically enhances productivity.
Let us say that your data-wrangling skills are quite good in R because of your mastery of the dplyr package. It may be that you are working on a project that requires Natural Language Processing libraries that exist in Python only. There is no need to make tough decisions. Quarto lets you use both!
Other uses
Of course, you can render fancy documents in Quarto even if equations or coding are not involved.
You could write your comprehensive examination or your prospectus in Quarto, and those documents will have a unique look that speaks volumes about your professionalization (trust me, demonstrating professionalization is critical in grad school!).
You could create your personal website in Quarto. Actually, this blog is made with Quarto. The GitHub repository is public, so feel free to fork it!
There is a detailed user guide to Quarto. You can visit it here. If you have questions about Quarto’s many functionalities, this is the first place you should look.