Research Guide

Research Guide

The purpose of this guide is to provide an approach to working on a research project that provides an efficient approach to collaborating with yourself (including your future self!) and other researchers. This guide follows our lab philosophy of Open and Reproducible Science.

1. Create a Github Repository for your research

   1. Create Repository

   2. Use Github Desktop to clone to your local computer (store in Documents->Github)

   3. Open project in RStudio (version 2022.07.2 build576 or later)

2. Create a draft manuscript to document your research (see Writing Guide in this lab manual).
3. Be sure to document all changes to your research using the ‘commit’ documentation. Be detailed. Consider doing smaller changes/commits to keep track of things.
4. Create a project board in Github to identify tasks in your project (to do, doing, done!). Retain these for future review.
5. Use Issues to document discussions, modifications, and workflow. Link Issues to tasks in your Project Board.
6. When you reach milestones in your work (say a draft for author review), create a Version in Github. This will help future you go back in time to a previous version of your work.

Things to remember as you work:

• Document everything! Assume you are documenting every detail for someone who is absolutely new to your work and needs to follow your methods exactly. Your future self will thank you!

For additional information:

Video Tutorial: Beautiful reports and presentations with Quarto (RStudio). Link here.