Abstract

Smarter research with R: Tools to save time and boost impact

Over the past five years, I’ve been trying to make my research and evaluation work at New Zealand Food Safety more efficient, transparent, and reproducible. Like many social scientists, I started learning R for analysis. But I quickly realised that the real power of R lies in its ecosystem for workflow management and reporting.

In this talk, I’ll share how I’ve progressively adopted tools like R Markdown, targets, and Quarto to help streamline the research process: from data wrangling and analysis to producing polished reports.

I’ll walk through practical examples of how these tools have helped me reduce duplication, improve version control, and create outputs that are both dynamic and easy to share. Along the way, I’ll highlight some challenges, lessons learned, and tips for anyone looking to move beyond ad hoc scripts toward a more structured and reproducible workflow.

Whether you’re a researcher, analyst, or policy professional, this session will show how embracing these tools can save time, improve quality, and make your work more impactful.