README.md

In svannoy/table1: Creates a Table of Descriptives Suited for MS-Word

table1

Creates a Table of Descriptives Suited for MS-Word

I created this package to ease the process of preparing a typical "table 1" as used in medical and social science research. Table 1 generally contains descriptive information for your sample. For integer variables like age or numeric variables like baseline depression scores, you generally want means and standard deviations. For categorical variables you generally want to know the number and relative percentage of cases within each category.

Another common feature of Table-1 is stratefication. Perhaps the most common example is two or more groups in a randomized control trial. Other examples might be different recruitment sites, or different disease status. When using stratification, Table 1 usually has a column presenting the summary statistics for each strata.

It is also very common to conduct statistical tests to determine if demographic variables differ by stratification groups. For integer and numeric variables it is common to use ANOVA, whereas for categorical variables chi-square tests are commonly used.

While R does all of these tasks very easily, what is missing is a convenient way to assemble them into a table that can be exported to Microsoft Word (MS-Word) that doesn't require subtantial editing.

Delow you see to versions of a Table 1 the first is the output using RMarkdown to MS-Word and the second is the table with manual edits made to conform to a typical journal format.

. And the final version .

. . As you can see, there is minimal editing required to have a final product.

The primary function in the table1 package is buildTable1, which relies upon buildTable1Rows. I have exported buildTable1Rows so you can call it directly, although I think in general one would call buildTable1. I have tried to make the functions as robust as possible so many errors are detected with helpful error messages, such as You called buildTable1Rows with groupBy set to age which is not a factor. See the built in help functions for more details.

Currently, the package is only available on GitHub and thus you must use Hadley Wickham's devtools package to install it. If you haven't installed that package, begin there (see commented command below in the installation instructions).

Installation

Development version from github:

# install.packages("devtools") # Uncomment this line if you don't have devtools installed already
devtools::install_github("svannoy/table1", build_vignettes = TRUE)

The file table1_markdown_example.Rmd in the Vignettes folder on github provides a demo for building a table.

svannoy/table1 documentation built on May 30, 2019, 8:45 p.m.