Creating APA-7 Ready Correlation Tables

Author

Affiliation

Seungju Kim

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Introduction

One of the most common, and yet painstaking, tasks in writing a manuscript is creating a table (correlation, regression, etc.).

Creating them by hand is not only time-consuming but also error-prone. Even when some softwares (SPSS) allow users to create tables, they are often not APA7 ready.

Today, I introduce a simple package called {apaTables} that will prepare an APA7 ready correlation table (the most commonly reported APA table) in 3 steps AND less than 5 minutes!

Note

This assumes that you have basic familiarity with R.

Step 1: Install {apaTables}

Do not install the package from CRAN, as one of the key features is not available there.

install.packages("remotes")
install.packages("rlang") 
remotes::install_github("dstanley4/apaTables")
library(apaTables)

Step 2: Load the data

To support maximum reproducibility, I will use the built-in dataset in R called trees.

data(trees)

Tip

If you are using your own dataset, make sure to load it using read_sav() or read_csv().

Step 3: Create the correlation table

Final step!

apa.cor.table(trees, filename = "correlation_table.doc")

This will create a correlation table in a Word document.

Warning

Note that apa.cor.tables only allows two output options (.doc OR .rtf). However, it is very easy to copy and paste a .doc file into a docx file.

Modify Output.

The full arguments are below.

apa.cor.table(
  trees,
  filename = NA, # (optional) a filename must end in .doc or .rtf
  table.number = 0, # optional, you can add in Word.
  show.conf.interval = TRUE, # Optional, and most would make this FALSE.
  show.sig.stars = TRUE,
  show.pvalue = TRUE, # unfortunately, it will only show ** < .01, which is why you should keep this TRUE to add a third *** for < .001.
  landscape = TRUE
)

Important

Unfortunately, it will only show * <.05 or ** < .01, which is why you should keep show.pvalue = TRUE to manually add a third *** for < .001.

All done!

Now you can pluck your APA correlation table into your manuscript in 5 minutes!

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Citations

citation()
citation("apaTables")