Analysis Manager: A Reproducible Research Tool for Generating Dynamic Documents using Microsoft Word

This talk will introduce Analysis Manager (AM) – an open source and free plug-in for conducting reproducible research and creating dynamic documents using Microsoft Word and Stata. AM was recently developed to address a critical need in the research community: there were no broadly accessible tools to integrate document preparation in Word with statistical code, results, and data. Popular tools such as Sweave, knitR, and weaver all use LaTeX, Markdown, and plan text editors for document preparation. Despite the merits of these programs, Microsoft Word is ubiquitous for manuscript preparation in many fields – such as medicine – in which conducting reproducible research is increasingly important. We developed AM to fill this void. AM provides an interface to edit Stata code directly from Word, and allows users to embed statistical output from that code (estimates, tables, figures) within Word. This output can then be individually or collectively updated in one-click with a behind-the-scenes call to Stata. With AM, modification of a dataset or analysis will no longer entail transcribing or re-copying results in to a manuscript or table. This talk will provide an introduction to using AM, including worked examples, and will be accessible to a wide range of users.