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Reproducible National-Level Reports: Using RMarkdown to Recode the Fisheries Economics of the United States Report (309574)

Keywords: R, RStats, RMarkdown, GitHub, Reproducible, Reporting, Fisheries

NOAA Fisheries produces the annual Fisheries Economics of the United States report. This report provides a detailed snapshot of the employment, sales, income, and value-added economic impacts as well as context for commercial and recreational fisheries and other marine-related sectors on a state, regional, and national basis. In an effort to modernize this analysis-intensive report, we have restructured production using reproducible and dynamic R Markdown files, R projects, version control management via GitHub, content-normalizing R functions, direct server and online data connections, and systematic output file organization. To aid in the report publication process, the scripts also output CSV files for subject matter experts and collaborators to review and use, copy-edit ready MS documents for editors, style guide-formatted and flow-in ready text, tables, and figures for graphic designers, and web-ready JavaScript data files for web tool developers. This effort has been invaluable to the future production of the report as it has centralized back-end data analyses, efficiently streamlined the copy-edit and design sub-processes, and maximized usefulness for other products.