lmustatdown

The lmustatdown package provides a handy template for writing a dissertation or Bachelor’s/ Master’s Thesis at the Department of Statistics, LMU Munich, and rendering those files in a PDF format following the LMU SLDS LaTeX template found here.

The original work, package thesisdown, can be found here.

This introduction, as well as a large part of the structure of this package, is based on its similar derivation made by the Humboldt University of Berlin, which can be found here.

Students will be writing in R Markdown, which is quite familiar to SLDS students at LMU, and the bookdown package (powered by pandoc ) is used to convert the code into LaTeX code and finally into a PDF document. (This package solely supports PDF-output according to the requirements of the department.)

In the event that you’ve never used bookdown before, check out this handy tutorial.

An example of the output can be seen here.

Usage

Initial Setup

1. To install the template, be sure you have the following:
   • pandoc
   • LaTeX
   • R >= 3.5.1
   • RStudio (optional, but it helps)
2. Install the necessary packages:

if (!require("devtools")) {
  install.packages("devtools", repos = "http://cran.rstudio.org")
}
devtools::install_github("rstudio/bookdown")
devtools::install_github("Yc-Han/lmustatdown")

3. Create a New R Markdown document in RStudio:

File -> New File -> R Markdown… then choose From template, then choose Thesis \{lmustatdown\}, and enter index as the Name. Note that this will currently ONLY be able to Knit if you name the directory index at this step.

If you’re not using RStudio, navigate to an empty directory and then run the following code:

rmarkdown::draft("index.Rmd", template = "thesis", package = "lmustatdown")

Rendering

To render your thesis, you can open index.Rmd in RStudio and then hit the “knit” button. Alternatively, you can use:

rmarkdown::render("index.Rmd")

Your thesis will be deposited in the thesis-output/ directory.

Writing Thesis

The following describes the components in the template. Getting familiar with these files will guide you in writing your thesis.

index.Rmd

This file is first created when generating a new template. It contains all the relevant meta-information (e.g. name, thesis title, advisor names). You will need to fill out the sections at the top of the page, which will then auto-populate your “Title Page” and “Declaration of Authorship”. If you are also familiar with the YAML header, you can also add additional LaTeX parameters or decide whether you want to add optional pages to your thesis such as the “Acknowledgements” section or the “List of Tables”.

_bookdown.yml

This is the main configuration file for your thesis. It determines what Rmd files are included in the output, and in what order. Arrange the order of your chapters in this file and ensure that the names match the names in your folders. The first file should always be the index.Rmd file. The rest will be the files that you create. Some example files are already included to help you along your way.

sections/

These are the sections or chapters that will be bound together in the final render. Here’s where you write the sections that make your thesis. You can name the files whatever you like, so long as they are indexed in the _bookdown.yml file.

In your day-to-day writing, you will be working with these files. You can write in markdown, just like you would in R Markdown. You can also write in LaTeX syntax if you prefer.

bib/

Store your bibliography (as bibtex files) here. This website may be helpful in generating the bibtex file in the correct format. You will need to cite the items in your thesis after adding them to the references.bib file in order for them to appear in your bibliography.

figures/ and data/

Store your figures and data here and reference them in your R Markdown files.

Structure of Thesis (Default)

The structure of the thesis template is as follows:

Frontmatter:

• titlepage (mandatory, auto-generated from template)
• acknowledgement (prelim/00-acknowledge.Rmd)
• abstract (prelim/00-abstract.Rmd)
• table of contents (mandatory, auto-generated from template)
• list of abbreviations (not mandatory, prelim/00-abbreviations.Rmd)
• list of figures (not mandatory, auto-generated from template)
• list of tables (not mandatory, auto-generated from template)

Body: the structure of the thesis body is not mandatory, but the references are:

• introduction (sections/01-intro.Rmd)
• methods (sections/02-method.Rmd)
• data (sections/03-data.Rmd)
• results (sections/04-results.Rmd)
• conclusion (sections/05-conclusion.Rmd)
• appendix (not mandatory, sections/99-appendix.Rmd)
• references (mandatory, auto-generated from template)

Last page:

• declaration of authorship (mandatory, auto-generated from template)