Activity 4

Overview

In this activity, you will provide a Status Report on your Semester Project (re)analysis project. This status report should be structured as follows:

Background: One paragraph overview of the science you are trying to achieve. This paragraph should include a ≥ 5 citations to key papers in the field that motivate the research question.

Process: One to two paragraph narrative describing the process that you have followed to date. For graduate students, this could mean describing the process you followed for retrieving the raw data sets, any confusions you felt regarding the methods of the original paper, and a summary of what you have and have not been able to reproduce so far. For undergraduate students, this could mean describing the process you undertook to understand the dataset you are working with, any visualizations you considered creating but ultimately rejected, etc. All students should also write about what new analyses or packages you have learned so far through your work on this project, and should include citations to each of the packages currently being used in the project.

Reproducible research code: Finally, your status report show include any code you have written so far to reproduce parts of your analysis. You should aim to create at least two plots or analyses similar to work presented in the paper you are working on. For most students, this will be in the format of R code chunks with their associated outputs; if your project entails substantial coding outside of R, please meet with me to discuss options.

Remaining steps and hurdles: Here, please describe your next steps for completing your project, and share any concerns you are currently anticipating. Please also list how you aim to overcome these hurdles.

Submission guidelines

Please submit this Activity as a PDF document that you push to the Semester Project git repository you created for Activity 3. Similar to submission guidelines for many journals, your PDF should adhere to the following formatting requirements:

  • All elements of the document must be double spaced.
  • The document should include page numbers and line numbers for all of the “core” content (i.e. everything except title and your name)
  • In-text citations and the bibliography must follow the formatting guidelines of the journal The American Naturalist.
  • The different sections outlined above (Background, Process, Reproducible Research Code, and Remaining Steps and Hurdles) must each have their own sub-heading within the PDF.

1 Note that this stylesheet is available at this link: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/tree/master