Speaker
Description
A PhD is a complex, multi-year project that involves managing a diverse range of information: from meeting notes to research ideas, from immediate tasks to long-term plans. Disorganized notes and files lead to inefficiencies, loss of information, and challenges in reproducing past workflows. This lightning talk presents a comprehensive PhD documentation template built with R and Quarto, meant to serve as a searchable, structured, and comprehensive documentation of all aspects of a PhD.
The template provides a structured framework for organizing research projects, meeting notes, funding opportunities, and more. It combines reproducible reporting with lightweight automation through custom R functions that generate standardized pages for projects, meetings, and literature notes. A visual project overview, multiple summary tables, and full-text search enable users to keep track of several concurrent tasks without losing sight of long-term goals, and quickly retrieve even years-old information.
While the template is designed with PhD students in mind, it can be easily adapted to other long-term projects, including for information sharing within a team. Every aspect of the template is fully customizable, with documentation in the corresponding GitHub repository on how to do so. Page templates and some outputs are generated with R, while all pages are markdown files rendered with Quarto. The lightweight setup is suitable for both local and web-based use.
In addition to sharing a ready-to-use template, the talk highlights the importance of internal knowledge management systems as a complement to other reproducible research practices.
If you used AI tools or services to support the preparation of this submission, please state the name and reason for using each of them.
GitHub Copilot code completions were enabled in my IDE while making the template to speed up repetitive steps.
Additional Material or Paper
GitHub repo of template: https://github.com/tinarozsos/phd-template
| Keywords: Please list up to 5 keywords to help us find the right session for your contribution. | reproducible research, PhD documentation, knowledge management, template |
|---|---|
| Virtual Option | This submission is for onsite presentation primarily, but I would also like it to be considered for pre-recorded virtual presentation if I don't get an onsite slot |
| Video Recording | Video sharing is fine |
| The author(s) agree(s) to take responsibility and be accountable for the contents of the submission and is/are authorized to present it. | Confirm |
| Interested in serving as reviewer? | t.d.rozsos@vu.nl |