Getting Started with Sweave: R, LaTeX, Eclipse, StatET, & TeXlipse

Being able to press a single button that runs all your statistical analyses and integrates the output into your final report is a beautiful thing. If you have not already heard, this is what Sweave can do for you. However, getting your computer to run Sweave can be a little bit fiddly. Thus, this post: (1) sets out the benefits of Sweave; (2) sets out how to install and configure R, Sweave, and Eclipse on Windows; (3) lists resources for people wanting to learn more about how to use LaTeX and Sweave; and (4) lists some specific resources relevant to researchers in psychology wanting to use these tools.

OVERVIEW

What is Sweave?

To Sweave is to weave in S. To weave is to combine data analysis code and standard formatted text into a single self-describing document. R is a dialect of S. Thus, if you use R to do your statistical analyses and you want to automate the importation of analyses in R into your reports, Sweave may be the tool for you. For a longer description, see Friedrich Leisch's (2002) Sweave: Dynamic Generation of Statistical Reports Using Literate Data Analysis.