Writing APA papers in R Markdown with papaja

A brief tutorial

Matthew Crump

10/31/2019

papaja is an R package written by Frederick Aust & Marius Barth.

papaja provides an R Markdown template for writing APA papers that can be compiled to .pdf or word document formats

The documentation for using papaja is here

https://crsh.github.io/papaja_man/
as a sidenote, this is also an online book written in R markdown and compiled with the bookdown package

Make sure you have devtools installed. papaja is not on CRAN, and we use devtools to install the package from Github.

install.packages("devtools")

Install Latex (for rendering to pdf). Note, rather than installing a full distribution, we can use the tinytex package which will install the components we need as we need them.

install.packages("tinytex")
tinytex::install_tinytex()

devtools::install_github("crsh/papaja")

set classoption to “man” for double-spaced draft style, or to “jou” for two-column apa-journal style.

We recommend placing raw data in the data-raw folder, and including a pre-processing script showing how the data is loaded into R. In this example, I also added the resulting dataframe to the R package for this tutorial, and then loaded the package in the manuscript to load the pre-processed data.

There other many strategies for creating a reproducible analysis. A large paper may have many code chunks and become unwieldly. It is possible to run the analysis scripts outside of the main document. For example, an analysis script might save R variables in an .RData or .Rda file, which can then be loaded in the main manuscript for reporting.

Consider using Zotero as a free and very useful citation manager https://www.zotero.org