Friends don't let friends copy and paste

Abstract

When psychologists report quantitative results, they routinely engage in copy-paste reporting: statistical results are copied from analysis software and pasted into a word processing program. Copy-paste reporting is tedious: if the analysis approach changes while the manuscript is being written or revised, the copying and pasting begins anew. In addition, copy-paste reporting is error-prone: a significant number of published research articles have inconsistent statistics (Brown & Heathers, 2016; Nuijten et al, 2016; Petrocelli, Clarkson, Whitmire, & Moon, 2013); even when the original data are available, the reported results are often difficult or impossible to reproduce (Artner et al, 2020; Eubank, 2016; Hardwicke et al, 2018; Stodden, Seiler, & Ma, 2018).

Dynamic documents are a time-saving and error-avoiding alternative to copy-paste reporting. By merging manuscript and analysis scripts, dynamic documents automate the reporting of results and ensure that statistics are consistent and up-to-date. At the same time, this makes documenting and reproducing analyses a secondary task. This workshop provides an introduction to the R package papaja, which can be used to create dynamic, submission-ready, APA-compliant manuscripts. Participants will learn how to automate reporting of quantitative results (including tables and graphs) and document formatting.

 

Speaker: Frederik Aust graduated in psychology at the University of Cologne and now works as a PostDoc at the University of Amsterdam. For several years now, he has been developing R packages that both make it easier for researchers and increase transparency in research (besides "papaja", for example, also "prereg").