Research project template

Contents

This repository is a template for starting new research project repositories. It comes preloaded with some useful stuff:

• Citation Style Language citation styles installed as a submodule in lib/ for managing citations;
• A .gitignore file for LaTeX, Jekyll (for GitHub pages), Python, and R, using GitHub's gitignore templates;
• GitHub pages should be set up to use docs/ on the Master branch;
• Reveal.js installed as a submodule in docs/ for creating web based slide presentations;
• A preconfigured _config.yml for Jekyll so it does not try to mess with you Reveal.js installation or to generate a web page from the README (there is a set of default options for using Pandoc to generate docs/index.html from the README, see below);
• Preconfigured defaults for generating documents with Pandoc, in the spec folder;
• Pandoc-xnos filter running inside a virtual environment;
• Lice to generate your license (Creative Commons attribution--share-alike by default), also in the virtual environment;
• A Makefile to set up all of the above with some sensible defaults (inspect the file to find out what they are and change as needed).

This is the general setup I use to start a research project writing in Markdown and using Pandoc to generate PDFs or Word documents. It works nicely in conjunction with an Open Science Framework project. I have tried to keep it simple and avoid feature bloat. Feel free to share your favorite starter setup with me on Twitter.

⚠️ For now, the makefile is set up to work only on Linux/Mac because it invokes shell commands. Help is appreciated in converting it to Python for cross-platform support.

Usage

• Click on the "Use this template" button above the file list and see further instructions on the page Creating a repository from a template on GitHub's Help documentation;
• After checking out the repository, use make install to set up submodules and the virtual environment (I expect you have rsync and Python 3 with pip installed);
• Citation styles are updated frequently; run make submodule often to keep up-to-date with the latest revisions.

⚠️ By default, only the chicago-author-date.csl style is checked out. Edit .install/modules/lib/styles/info/sparse-checkout and run make submodule at any time if you want to add other citation styles.

You may also want to fork this repository to create your own template, or contribute features to this one.

Tip: if you have several repositories based on this template, you might not want to replicate the virtual environment on every one of them, but rather invoke it from a single location, to save a little disk space. If this is the case, do not run make install but instead pick the make targets you need individually (inspect the Makefile to find out which ones).

License

Research project template repository Copyright (C) 2020 Pedro P. Palazzo

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

• The Citations Styles Language Styles belong to CitationStyles.org and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. The
• Reveal.js framework is Copyright (C) 2019 Hakim El Hattab, http://hakim.se, and is licensed under the MIT License.
• Pandoc-Xnos is licensed by Thomas G. Duck under the GPL v3.
• I am not affiliated in any way with any of the organizations or people whose software I have included here.