Visualisation in research is an important element in distilling the key points of technical information to make it understandable. I love the ggplot2 R package and have used it for research publications but found myself wondering if there were other R packages that could plot statistical results easily.

After a tumultuous year which was 2021, I thought I’d start the year with a bit of reflection in 2022. Eventually I decided that I’d write a seemingly generic post on reasons to start learning R except I wanted to unwrap what were my reasons on how exactly I ended up learning R to begin with.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” R doesn’t need to be used only for purely data manipulation and analysis. I had used a number of data visualisation packages in R to help a client with suitable visuals.

While I have developed and published interactive dashboards on my website, I started thinking about the practicalities of creating dashboards for business reporting only. It occurred to me that, yes, large-scale reporting tools such as Tableau and Power BI that are amazing at producing self-service dashboards but organisations still rely on conventional reporting methods through the means of creating documents presenting findings from analyses.

Goal setting and achievement As the new year comes to an end, many people including myself will be contemplating how the next year will look. Specifically, I’ll be thinking about what I will be doing differently and what I will want to achieve in various life domains.

Studies are everywhere I tend to read through meta-analyses to get the jist of an area of interest. For example, I might want to know, without trawling through hundreds of studies, how effective a specific type of psychotherapy is for a particular psychiatric condition.