In iheiddown: For Writing Geneva Graduate Institute Documents

Preface {.unnumbered}

knitr::write_bib(c(.packages(), "bookdown"), "bib/packages.bib")

Welcome to the RMarkdown template for writing masters theses or PhD dissertations at the Geneva Graduate Institute. This sample content is based on the IHEID LaTeX dissertation template and the R bookdown package.

But hopefully it will provide a nicer interface for those that have never used \TeX\ or \LaTeX\ before.

Using R Markdown will also allow you to easily keep track of your analyses in R chunks of code, with the resulting plots and output included as well.
The hope is this R Markdown template gets you in the habit of doing reproducible research, which benefits you long-term as a researcher, but also will greatly help anyone that is trying to reproduce or build onto your results down the road.

Hopefully, you won't have much of a learning period to go through and you will reap the benefits of a nicely formatted thesis.
The use of \LaTeX\ in combination with Markdown is more consistent than the output of a word processor, much less prone to corruption or crashing, and the resulting file is smaller than a Word file. While you may have never had problems using Word in the past, your thesis is likely going to be about twice as large and complex as anything you've written before, taxing Word's capabilities.
After working with Markdown and R together for a few weeks, we are confident this will be your reporting style of choice going forward.

Why use it? {-}

RMarkdown creates a simple and straightforward way to interface with the beauty of \LaTeX.
Packages have been written in R to work directly with \LaTeX\ to produce nicely formatting tables and paragraphs. In addition to creating a user friendly interface to \LaTeX\, RMarkdown also allows you to read in your data, to analyze it and to visualize it using R functions, and also to provide the documentation and commentary on the results of your project.
Further, it allows for R results to be passed inline to the commentary of your results.
You'll see more on this later.

Who should use it? {-}

Anyone who needs to analyses data, include lots of tables or figures, complex cross-references, mathematical equations, or just cares about the final appearance of their document should use RMarkdown. Therefore, while this template should be of particular interest to those planning to use R for their dissertations, the user-friendly nature of writing Markdown coupled with the extraordinary flexibility of \LaTeX\ (and the power of R) should make useful for everyone writing theses or dissertations at the Geneva Graduate Institute.