Table talk: reproducible table creation in R for epidemiological research
A lightning talk at useR! 2024
About the conference
useR! 2024 took place in Salzburg, Austria from July 8 to 11, 2024. The conference’s 20th anniversary brought together R users from around the world, featuring presentations that showcased the latest advancements and applications of the programming language. I was honoured to have my submission selected for a five-minute lightning talk.
What I presented
This abstract has been edited for conciseness
Summary tables are common in scientific manuscripts reporting epidemiological studies. Table 1 typically displays key demographic information about the study population while Table 2 often presents associations between explanatory and outcome variables. Given the variety of ways to create these tables in R (some more robust than others), our research group developed a reproducible workflow suitable for colleagues with varying levels of R proficiency.
In this talk, I will discuss the landscape of table-generating packages, present our solution, and explain how we overcame challenges like incorporating existing metadata. These strategies are not only valuable for epidemiologists but also for researchers in other health and social sciences.