tisemdown

This project provides a RMarkdown template to support Tilburg School of Economics and Management students to adhere to thesis formatting guidelines for their Masters Thesis.

Quick Start Guide

Pre-requisite Packages

{tisemdown} builds PDF files from R Markdown documents using LaTeX. You need to make sure that LaTeX and R Markdown are installed on your PC. To do this:

• Open RStudio
• Enter the following lines into the console and press RETURN:

install.packages(c('tinytex', 'rmarkdown', 'bookdown'))
# below installs latex
tinytex::install_tinytex()
# after restarting RStudio, confirm that you have LaTeX with
tinytex:::is_tinytex()

Install tisemdown

tisemdown is installed from GitHub:

if (!require("remotes")) 
  install.packages("remotes", repos = "https://cran.rstudio.org")
  remotes::install_github("deer-marketing-lab/tisemdown")

Note that you will need to restart RStudio at this point before going to the next step.

Getting Started with the {tisemdown} template.

Follow these steps:

• Create a new RStudio project with a {tisemdown} template.
  • In RStudio, click on File > New Project > New Directory.
  • Then select Thesis Project using tisemdown from the dropdown. It will be near the bottom.
    • HINT: You’ll see the graduation cap as the icon on the left for the appropriate project type.

• Next, give your project a name and specify where you’d like the files to appear. In the screenshot below, the project name is my_thesis and it will appear as a new folder on my Desktop.

4. After choosing which type of output you’d like in the YAML at the top of index.Rmd, Knit the index.Rmd file to get the book in PDF or HTML formats. The PDF file of your thesis will be deposited in the _book/ directory, by default.

5. To add new chapters, edit existing- or create new Rmd files with your thesis content

Going Further

Day-to-day writing of your thesis

You need to edit the individual chapter R Markdown files to write your thesis. It’s recommended that you version control your thesis using GitHub if possible. RStudio can also easily sync up with GitHub to make the process easier. While writing, you should git commit your work frequently, after every major activity on your thesis. For example, every few paragraphs or section of text, and after major step of analysis development. You should git push at the end of each work session before you leave your computer or change tasks. For a gentle, novice-friendly guide to getting starting with using Git with R and RStudio, see https://happygitwithr.com/.

Rendering different formats

To render your thesis into a PDF, open index.Rmd in RStudio and then click the “knit” button. To change the output formats between PDF, gitbook and Word, look at the output: field in index.Rmd and comment-out the formats you don’t want.

The knitted file of your thesis will be deposited in the _book/ directory, by default.

Directories and Files within the Template

The following components are ones you should edit to customize your thesis:

index.Rmd

This file contains all the meta information that goes at the beginning of your document. You’ll need to edit the top portion of this file (the YAML) to put your name on the first page, the title of your thesis, etc. Note that you need to have at least one chapter start in the index.Rmd file for the build to work. For the template, this is done with # Introduction in the example from the template.

01-chap1.Rmd, 02-chap2.Rmd, etc.

These are the Rmd files for each chapter in your dissertation. Write your thesis in these. If you’re writing in RStudio, you may find the wordcount addin useful for getting word counts and readability statistics in R Markdown documents.

bib/

Store your bibliography (as bibtex files) here. We recommend using the citr addin and Zotero to efficiently manage and insert citations.

csl/

Specific style files for bibliographies should be stored here. A good source for citation styles is https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles#readme.

figure/ and data/

Store your figures and data here and reference them in your R Markdown files. See the bookdown book for details on cross-referencing items using R Markdown.

_bookdown.yml

This is the main configuration file for your thesis. You can change the name of your outputted file here for your thesis and other options about your thesis here.

Generally, I wouldn’t change this file

Extra Info

Currently, the PDF and gitbook versions are fully-functional. The word and epub versions are developmental, have no templates behind them, and are essentially calls to the appropriate functions in bookdown.

Under the hood, the a LaTeX template is used to ensure that documents conform precisely to submission standards. At the same time, composition and formatting can be done using lightweight markdown syntax, and R code and its output can be seamlessly included using rmarkdown.

Extra LateX Packages?

You may need to install a few extra LaTeX packages as your thesis develops. Here is one such example of how to do so:

tinytex::tlmgr_install("babel-portuges")

Acknowledgements

This project was inspired by the thesisdown and bookdown packages.