codebook: Create codebook for a dataset

In worcs: Workflow for Open Reproducible Code in Science

Create codebook for a dataset

Description

Creates a codebook for a dataset in 'R Markdown' format, and renders it to 'markdown' for 'GitHub'. A codebook contains metadata and documentation for a data file. We urge users to customize the automatically generated 'R Markdown' document and re-knit it, for example, to add a paragraph with details on the data collection procedures. The variable descriptives are stored in a .csv file, which can be edited in 'R' or a spreadsheet program. Columns can be appended, and we encourage users to complete at least the following two columns in this file:

category

Describe the type of variable in this column. For example: "morality".

description

Provide a plain-text description of the variable. For example, the full text of a questionnaire item: "People should be willing to do anything to help a member of their family".

Re-knitting the 'R Markdown' file (using render) will transfer these changes to the 'markdown' file for 'GitHub'.

Usage

make_codebook(
  data,
  filename = "codebook.Rmd",
  render_file = TRUE,
  csv_file = gsub("rmd$", "csv", filename, ignore.case = TRUE),
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

data	A data.frame for which to create a codebook.
filename	Character. File name to write the codebook rmarkdown file to.
render_file	Logical. Whether or not to render the document.
csv_file	Character. File name to write the codebook rmarkdown file to. By default, uses the filename stem of the filename argument. Set to NULL to write the codebook only to the 'R Markdown' file, and not to .csv.
verbose	Logical. Whether or not to print status messages to the console. Default: TRUE

Value

Logical, indicating whether or not the operation was successful. This function is mostly called for its side effect of rendering an 'R Markdown' codebook.

Examples

if(rmarkdown::pandoc_available("2.0")){
  library(rmarkdown)
  library(knitr)
  filename <- tempfile("codebook", fileext = ".Rmd")
  make_codebook(iris, filename = filename, csv_file = NULL)
  unlink(c(
    ".worcs",
    filename,
    gsub("\\.Rmd", "\\.md", filename),
    gsub("\\.Rmd", "\\.html", filename),
    gsub("\\.Rmd", "_files", filename)
  ), recursive = TRUE)
}

worcs documentation built on June 8, 2025, 10:25 a.m.