19 Finding help
19.1 From within R
?...,help(...): help for a specific function (you know the name of it)??...,help.search(...)(orhelp.search(...,agrep=FALSE)to avoid partial matching): includes packages and partial matching
19.2 Task views
- Task views (or this view )
19.3 RStudio Website
- Cheat Sheets: https://rstudio.com/resources/cheatsheets/ (Also from RStudio IDE -> Help -> Cheatsheets)
- Books: https://rstudio.com/resources/books/
- Webinar series: https://resources.rstudio.com/
19.4 Solving problems
There are 2 big categories of errors:
- The code will not run (aka R is complaining… like a lot)
- The code is running, but the results are erroneous (the hardest one to solve)
19.4.1 Do it yourself
Few strategies:
- try to reproduce the problem
- break it down to narrow the problematic piece of code (the degugger can help you)
- try with a small sample dataset
- try with a test dataset you built to test edge cases
19.4.2 Search Forums, blogs, …
- Google :)
- StackExchange https://stackexchange.com/ and the more known StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/
- RStudio https://education.rstudio.com/ and its community website https://community.rstudio.com/
- RopenSci https://ropensci.org/about/
- r-bloggers
- Twitter:
#rstats
19.4.3 Posting a question
It is recommended to provide a reproducible example when posting a question on a forum. reprex is a great R package to help you to do so.
Most of the time, creating a reproducible example on a data sample will help you to solve your problem on your own
19.5 Communities
- Friends and colleagues
- Local user groups: R User Groups, R-ladies on Meetup
- Universities (e.g. Software Carpentry workshops)
19.6 NCEAS
NCEAS computing team is here to advise and support your working group!
For data science questions: SciComp@nceas.ucsb.edu
For technical questions: help@nceas.ucsb.edu
For KNB questions: knb-help@nceas.ucsb.edu
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Hampton, Stephanie E, Sean Anderson, Sarah C Bagby, Corinna Gries, Xueying Han, Edmund Hart, Matthew B Jones, et al. 2015. “The Tao of Open Science for Ecology.” Ecosphere 6 (July). https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/ES14-00402.1.
Munafò, Marcus R., Brian A. Nosek, Dorothy V. M. Bishop, Katherine S. Button, Christopher D. Chambers, Nathalie Percie du Sert, Uri Simonsohn, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Jennifer J. Ware, and John P. A. Ioannidis. 2017. “A Manifesto for Reproducible Science.” Nature Human Behaviour 1 (1): 0021. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0021.
White, Ethan, Elita Baldridge, Zachary Brym, Kenneth Locey, Daniel McGlinn, and Sarah Supp. 2013. “Nine Simple Ways to Make It Easier to (Re)use Your Data.” Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 6 (2). https://doi.org/10.4033/iee.2013.6b.6.f.