On the Programmatic Generation of Reproducible Documents

TL;DR

This paper discusses methods for programmatically generating reproducible documents, emphasizing the distinction between computationally generated components and human-written prose, with a case study in clinical trial reporting using R.

Contribution

It introduces guidelines for creating reproducible documents with programmatic components and demonstrates these concepts through the listdown R package and a clinical trial use case.

Findings

Guidelines for programmatic document generation established

The listdown package facilitates reproducible report creation in R

Application demonstrated in clinical trial reporting context

Abstract

Reproducible document standards, like R Markdown, facilitate the programmatic creation of documents whose content is itself programmatically generated. While these documents are generally not complete in the sense that they will not include prose content, generated by an author to provide context, a narrative, etc., programmatic generation can provide substantial efficiencies for structuring and constructing documents. This paper explores the programmatic generation of reproducible by distinguishing components than can be created by computational means from those requiring human-generated prose, providing guidelines for the generation of these documents, and identifying a use case in clinical trial reporting. These concepts and use case are illustrated through the listdown package for the R programming environment, which is is currently available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).