Publication Ready Tables in R

Are you tired of spending your time manually formatting tables for article submission? Does the idea of pasting regression coefficients from R to Excel make you wince? This session will demo how to make publication-quality (and reproducible!) data tables in R. We’ll use the gt package to showcase options for table customization and the gtsummary package for ways to combine model outputs with table creation.

Note that this session assumes a working knowledge of R; we will dive straight into main table content without a general overview of R.

Workshop time: 2/11/2026, 2:00-3:00pm

Workshop registration: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/U2EwnvgUQiGL9VkivKWK-Q#/registration

Instructors: Stephanie Labou & Julien Brun

About the data

The dataset used for this workshop is from the Journal article “Seasonal changes in plankton food web structure and carbon dioxide flux from Southern California reservoirs” by and Adamczyk & Shurin (2015) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0140464

The dataset used has been downloaded from Dryad: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6tn4h

Attribute level metadata

The columns in this data file are the variables measured. The rows are the lakes (Poway, Murray, Miramar) and dates sampled.

Variables measured and their units:

  • julian_date = year number followed by day number. (For example, 13177 is the 177th day of 2013)
  • sampling_date = number of sampling days
  • h2o_temp_c = water temperature (degrees celsius)
  • air_temp_c = air temperature (degrees celsius)
  • wind_speed_kph = wind speed (kilometers per hour)
  • ph = pH
  • total_alkalinity_ppm = total alkalinity (parts per million)
  • chlorophyll_a_ugL = chlorophyll-a (micrograms per liter)
  • salinity_ppt = salinity (parts per thousand)
  • pco2_water_ppm = partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the water (parts per million)
  • bacteria_number_per_L = bateria abundance (number per liter)
  • total_nitrogen_mgL = total nitrogen (milligrams per liter)
  • total_phosphorus_mgL = total phosphorus (milligrams per liter)
  • dissolved_organic_carbon_mgL = dissolved organic carbon (milligrams per liter)
  • particulate_organic_nitrogen_mgL = particulate organic nitrogen (milligrams per liter)
  • particulate_organic_carbon_mgL = particulate organic carbon (milligrams per liter)
  • co2_flux_mmol_m_day = carbon dioxide flux (millimoles per square meter (m-2) per day (day-1))
  • pco2_atmosphere_ppm = partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (parts per million)
  • zooplankton_community_avg_legnth_mm = mean length of zooplankton community sampled (millimeters)
  • zooplankton_community_biomass_mgL = biomass of zooplankton community sampled (milligrams per liter)