To begin, be sure that bookdown is already installed on your computer.

# make sure bookdown is installed
install.packages("bookdown")

Introducing Bookdown

Bookdown is an R Markdown extension that can be used to create reports. In this lesson however you will review briefly how to use bookdown to create single document reports. The steps are as follows:

1. Add the Following Code to Your YAML Header in Your R Markdown Document

Note that this code replaces the output: html_document that is the default for R Markdown.

output:
  bookdown::html_document2: default

This tells R to use bookdown rather than the conventional R Markdown. Notice below you use html_document2 to create html output with inline citations.

To achieve different styling and formats, you can replace html_document2 with other outputs including:

• tufte_html2,
• pdf_document2,
• word_document2,
• tufte_handout2,
• and tufte_book2

Learn more about bookdown output options here.

Your R Markdown YAML header will thus look like this:

---
title: "Your title here"
author: "Your name here"
output:
  bookdown::html_document2: default
---

2. Create a BibTex File Containing References

Next, create a BibTex file containing all of the citations that you will use in your report. A BibTex file is a text formatted, machine readable reference list. You can create BibTex reference lists in many reference manager tools including Zotero and Mendeley or you can go the hard route and make one on your own. A BibTex file should be named with a .bib extension for example references.bib and needs to be saved using the UTF-8 encoding.

An example of a BibText formatted citation is below.

@Manual{anderson2015,
  title = {Exhumation by debris flows in the 2013 Colorado Front Range storm},
  author = { S.W. Anderson and S.P. Anderson and R.S Anderson},
  journal = {Geology},
  year = {2015},
  pages = {31,94},
  url = {https://www.R-project.org/},
}

Be sure to save that file in the same working directory with your .Rmd file!

3. Add a Link to Your BibText File to the YAML Header

Using the code below, add a link to your BibTex file.

bibliography: your-bib-file.bib

Now your entire YAML header looks like this:

---
title: "Your title here"
author: "Your name here"
output:
  bookdown::html_document2: default
bibliography: your-bib-file.bib
---

You can also add the link-citations: yes argument to your YAML header to ensure that R creates links from your citation to the bibliography below. Like this:

---
title: "Your title here"
author: "Your name here"
output:
  bookdown::html_document2: default
bibliography: your-bib-file.bib
link-citations: yes
---

Add In-text Citations / References to Your Report

Finally you can add citations to a report. To do this you use the syntax

@anderson2015

Where anderson2015 is the name of the Anderson citation (used an example below). The @ sign tells R to find that particular citation in the .bib file.

Add Unique Styles

If you want - you can also apply custom stylesheets (you have to create the .css file or use someone elses!), add figure captions, apply themes that are built into R Markdown and bookdown and specify a table of contents.

Explore the options below to see what they do when you add them to your YAML output at the top of your R Markdown document.

---
title: "Your title here"
author: "Your name here"
output:
  bookdown::html_document2:
    css: styles.css
    fig_caption: yes
    theme: flatly
    toc: yes
    toc_depth: 1
bibliography: your-bib-file.bib
link-citations: yes
---