apathe is an R package that facilitates writing computationally reproducible student theses that conform to the American Psychological Association (APA) manuscript guidelines (6th Edition). The package provides an R Markdown template that can be used with (or without) RStudio to create PDF documents (using the apa6 LaTeX class). apathe is built on top of the package papaja but is tailored to the specific requirements of student theses and omits some features for simplicity.
If you believe you have found a bug or would like to request a new feature, open an issue on Github and provide a minimal complete verifiable example.
To use apathe you need either a recent version of RStudio or pandoc. You additionally need a TeX distribution; we recommend you use TinyTex, which can be installed from within R:
if(!requireNamespace("tinytex", quietly = TRUE)) install.packages("tinytex")
tinytex::install_tinytex()Using other TeX distributions is possible. Please refer to the papaja manual for detailed installation instructions.
apathe is not yet available on CRAN but you can install it from this GitHub repository:
# Install remotes package if necessary
if(!requireNamespace("remotes", quietly = TRUE)) install.packages("remotes")
# Install the stable development version from GitHub
remotes::install_github("crsh/apathe")Once apathe is installed, you can select the APA-style thesis template when creating a new R Markdown file through the RStudio menus.
To add citations, specify your bibliography-file in the YAML front
matter of the document (bibliography: my.bib) and start
citing (for details, see pandoc manual on the citeproc
extension). apathe supports DOI-based citations via
the doi2cite
filter, see rmdfiltr
vignette. Any of the follow DOI tags can be used in the text:
@https://doi.org/@doi.org/@DOI:@doi:For example, @doi:10.1080/01621459.2025.2516210. When
the document is rendered, doi2cite queries CrossRef for the
bibliographic information, writes it to a local BibTeX-file and replaces
the citation key by the proper BibTeX key.
This requires that the designated file __from_DOI.bib
(it currently has to be this file name!) is added to the
bibliography field of the YAML front matter
Please cite apathe if you use it.
Aust, F. (2024). apathe: American Psychological Association Thesis with R Markdown. R package version 0.0.1. Retrieved from https://github.com/crsh/apatheFor convenience, you can use
cite_r() or copy the reference information returned by
citation('apathe') to your BibTeX file:
@Manual{,
title = {{apathe}: {American} Psychological Association Thesis with {R Markdown}},
author = {Frederik Aust},
year = {2024},
note = {R package version 0.0.1},
url = {https://github.com/crsh/apathe},
}
Like apathe and want to contribute? We highly appreciate any contributions to the R package or its documentation. Take a look at the open issues if you need inspiration.
Please note that the apathe project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.
