General code stock and how-to documents for general research purposes
Created and maintained by Cody Dailey
Creation Date: 14 September 2020
Last Update: 14 September 2020
My goal with this repository (aptly named "Journal of Walkthroughs") is to provide a collection of general-use, reusable, and technical documentation which may help anyone in the odyssey of research. My focus will likely be on health data analysis (as my background is in Epidemiology and Biostatistics). Also, my program of choice is R, so most materials will be created using R/RStudio/RMarkdown (maybe even bookdown if necessitated by complexity). However, I hope to extend this foundation to a more comprehensive approach to research. For now, I will include several small-scale aspects which may come in handy for some. Perhaps not, only time will tell.
Truth to the matter, this repository will help me consolidate skills and code that I have developed. In doing that, I will be able to return to these documents whenever needed in the future and have a how-to manual written by me, for me. :)
While there are many resources for help in research and there is no true "one-size-fits-all" approach, there are similarities in approaches.
These may include, but are not limited to:
- Project conceptualization
- Project management / scheduling
- Literature review
- Data collection
- Data analysis
- Results presentation
- Discussion of significance and implications
Anything that can help in any one of these aspects (or many) might be found in this collection.
I will attempt to section out the materials into three levels:
- Beginner
- Intermediate
- Advanced
In general, the Beginner documents will have a single task and/or skill associated with them, while the Intermediate and Advanced materials will be built in a hierachical fashion. That is, an Intermediate or Advanced document will likely combine two or more code-sets / tasks / skills into one cohesive document. For example, the Intermediate document Analyzing a Continuous Response Variable could contain skills / code covered in simpler Beginner documents such as Visualizing a Continuous Variable, Calculating a Correlation Coefficient, or Fitting a Simple Linear Regression Model. I will try and back-reference simpler documents, but it is possible that skills / code included in higher level materials will be more unique to task and not directly pulled from simpler documents.
Furthermore, the structuring of the subfolders within each skill-level archive will be inherently different. For Beginner materials, I will try to partition / categorize documents appropriately, e.g., Data Visualization or Data Analysis. However, as the Intermediate and Advanced materials will combine multiple skills / tasks / code found in the Beginner documents, the categorization may be insufficient / inaccurate. So, higher-level materials will not likely be similarly categorized.
Fair warning, my mind is random and this will likely manifest in the structure / materials found within the repo.
I will attempt to maintain a Table of Contents as a separate document. Consult this for a comprehensive list of included documents in the Journal of Walkthroughs.
If you have a document that you think fits this general purpose / design or would like to create one, feel free to reach out to me and we can discuss adding it to the repository. If I remember, I will create a Beginner document containing information on the structuring / outline of Walkthroughs that I would like to remain consistent.
Happy researching!
Cody Dailey
daileyco@uga.edu