Cite R Packages on the Fly in R Markdown and Quarto • pakret

Overview

pakret is a minimalistic R package citation tool to reference and cite R and R packages on the fly in R Markdown and Quarto.

Installation

Install pakret from CRAN with:

install.packages("pakret")

Alternatively, you can install the development version of pakret from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("arnaudgallou/pakret")

Usage

Simply use pkrt() whenever you want to cite R or an R package in your document:

---
bibliography: references.bib
---

```{r}
#| include: false
library(pakret)
```

We used `r pkrt("foo")` to extract the data.

Analyses were performed using `r pkrt("bar")`.

## References

pakret handles everything for you.

Here’s the markdown output produced by the document above:

We used the ‘foo’ package version 1.0.0 (Fastandfurius, Clausus, and
Lastopus 2020) to extract the data.

Analyses were performed using the ‘bar’ package version 0.2.0
(Itisalapsus 2024).

## References

Fastandfurius, Caius, Numerius Clausus, and Marcus Lastopus. 2020. *Foo:
Alea Jacta Est*.

Itisalapsus, Julius. 2024. *Bar: Tempus Edax Rerum*.

It’s also possible to cite a collection of packages with pkrt_list():

---
bibliography: references.bib
---

```{r}
#| include: false
library(pakret)
```

We used the following packages: `r pkrt_list("foo", "bar")`.

## References

We used the following packages: ‘foo’ v. 1.0.0 (Fastandfurius, Clausus,
and Lastopus 2020), ‘bar’ v. 0.2.0 (Itisalapsus 2024).

## References

Fastandfurius, Caius, Numerius Clausus, and Marcus Lastopus. 2020. *Foo:
Alea Jacta Est*.

Itisalapsus, Julius. 2024. *Bar: Tempus Edax Rerum*.

Unhappy with the default templates? pakret lets you define your own:

---
bibliography: references.bib
---

```{r}
#| include: false

library(pakret)
pkrt_set(pkg = "the R package :pkg (v. :ver; :ref)")
```

We used `r pkrt("foo")` to analyse the data.

## References

We used the R package foo (v. 1.0.0; Fastandfurius, Clausus, and
Lastopus (2020)) to analyse the data.

## References

Fastandfurius, Caius, Numerius Clausus, and Marcus Lastopus. 2020. *Foo:
Alea Jacta Est*.

Note that by default pakret writes new references into the first .bib file specified in the bibliography list. You can change which .bib file to save references to using pkrt_set().