Thus, I ended up specifying my name using the subtitle field and put some other info in the author field: title: 'Assessing and supporting working memory in children: the role of attention and the environment' When I had a play with this I found that the default formatting of the author and subtitle didn’t really suit my university’s formatting requirements. Happily with bookdown you can specify the title, subtitle, and author in the YAML front matter. One thing you’ll have to do for a thesis is create a title page. In your index.Rmd file there will be some YAML front matter where you can include various bits information, as well as controlling the output in various ways.įor more information on YAML you can head here or to the bookdown book. Markdown has many benefits by itself, and using it also sets you up nicely to use bookdown for your thesis. I similarly had another paper where I had written the whole initial draft using markdown.įor PhD students who might want to use bookdown for their thesis I’d strongly recommend using markdown for any analysis reports or papers you write along the way. The biggest thing that made using bookdown so accessible for me was that I already had lots of my analyses written up in markdown.įor example, for one of my thesis chapters I had already submitted a paper where I had a markdown file for all the analysis (see here). I would say that learning R Markdown is an essential part of learning R nowadays, so hopefully R users reading this post already know some markdown. What I did have going into writing my thesis was considerable prior experience with R Markdown, which I started using at the end of the first year of my PhD. Nevertheless, the fact that I was able to successfully write my thesis using bookdown is a testament to the accessibility of the tool, even for someone who hadn’t written a line of code before starting a PhD. Some of the tips I present here may, therefore, be suboptimal.
Indeed, I had no experience with LaTeX prior to writing my thesis, and limited knowledge of the pandoc internals. The first thing to highlight is that I’m not a pandoc or LaTeX expert.
I will assume that readers know a bit about R Markdown a decent knowledge of R Markdown is going to be essential to using bookdown.
The idea of this post is to supplement the fantastic book that Xie has written about bookdown, which can be found here. This post details some tips and tricks for writing a thesis/dissertation using the bookdown R package by Yihui Xie.
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