This repo contains a submission for the 2020 Rstudio Table Contest.
This submission is an entry for the static-print category. Systematic reviews are a type of academic publication, which involves the identification, critical appraisal and synthesis of results from multiple studies. It is very common in these types of static print publications for a ‘summary’ of the characteristics of each study included in the systematic review to be presented in the form of a table consisting entirely of text. This submission demonstrates how the flextable package was used to replace some of the text with graphical features for a study characteristics table. The printing of the table in landscape format in the knitted word document was achieved using the officedown package. This table format is highly customisable. An example of a published static-print table using this same format, which we created for an earlier publication, is available here. Some features of the table include:
- Use of a coloured inline ‘minibar’ images to show the male:female ratio in included studies
- Images of flags (using flagon) to indicate the country (in addition to being aesthetically more pleasing than presenting this information in text, this feature also reduced the amount of horizontal space required for this column, which is useful for static-print tables that need to be incorporated into Word documents).
- Use of inline ‘minibar’ images so the reader can more quickly and clearly distinguish between studies that included higher numbers of participants than if the information was presented in text format
An RStudio Cloud project is available to demonstrate how flextable (and officedown) can be used to produce the table in static-print format.
