Course Guides

Below you will find a list of available guides for QTM 385. These guides are designed to help you prepare your pre-analysis plans and use Quarto to create reproducible research documents and presentations. If you have any questions or suggestions for new guides, please feel free to reach out to the course instructor.

Available Guides

• Markdown Guide: An introduction to Markdown, a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax.
• Quarto Guide: An introduction to Quarto, a document authoring system that supports Markdown, LaTeX, R, Python, and more.
• PAP Guide: A guide to creating pre-analysis plans (PAPs) for experimental research.
• EGAP Research Design Form: A guide to help you think through the key components of your research design. Source: EGAP.

Additional Resources

Markdown

• Markdown Cheatsheet: A quick reference guide to Markdown syntax.
• Markdown Guide: A comprehensive guide to Markdown syntax and features.
• GitHub Markdown Guide: A guide to using Markdown on GitHub.
• Markdown Tutorial: An interactive tutorial to learn Markdown.

Quarto

• Quarto Documentation: The official documentation for Quarto, including installation instructions and usage guides.
• Awesome Quarto: https://github.com/mcanouil/awesome-quarto. This repository contains dozens of tutorials, examples, and resources.
• Çetinkaya-Rundel, M. & Lowndes, J. S. (2022) Keynote talk: Hello Quarto: Share • Collaborate • Teach • Reimagine. Slides and source code. This is one of the nicest Quarto presentations I have seen.
• Getting Started with Quarto (YouTube). Posit (formerly RStudio) has a series of tutorials on Quarto on their YouTube channel. You can find their playlist here.
• Quarto extensions. Several extensions are available to enhance the functionality of Quarto, such as manuscript templates, citations, and cross-references.

Pre-Analysis Plans

• BITSS Resource Library: The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) provides a collection of resources on research transparency and reproducibility. It has a section on pre-analysis plans and many other useful materials.
• 10 Things to Know About Pre-Analysis Plans: A comprehensive guide by EGAP that best practices for creating pre-analysis plans.
• Pre-Analysis Plans by J-PAL: The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) also provides resources and guidelines for developing pre-analysis plans.
• How Good Are Pre-Analysis Plans?: A blog post by the World Bank discussing the effectiveness of pre-analysis plans and offering lessons for writing and reviewing them.

Feedback and Questions

For any questions or issues regarding these tutorials, please open a GitHub issue, submit a pull request, or create a discussion post.

Please do not forget that, in addition to the guides, the course syllabus also contains a list of recommended weekly readings and additional resources.

I hope you like the guides and find them useful!