README files

Last updated on 2025-08-06 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

Where can I give proper installation instructions?
What licenses can I add for text, figures, and data?
How do I generate a citation for my project?
How can I increase the visibility of community guidelines?

Objectives

Recognise good practices for README files.
Complement the rcompendium README template.
Identify your project features related to Open science.

README files

README files can include a whole range of information from an overview of the project, installation instructions and licensing details to information on how to contribute to the code and cite the software. With modern text markup and formatting through Markdown, README files can also be rendered in a much more accessible and appealing manner than traditional plain-text README files. (Cohen and Crouch, 2023)

Good practices

There is no standard for README files, but we can use some widely used approaches. Here we list some README good practices collected by Cohen and Crouch, 2023:

Consider a formatting, layout, or structure.
Ensure clear and concise descriptions.
Avoid overloading the README with content that could be hosted elsewhere.
Consider including a table of contents if you have many sections.
Know your audience - Is your README aimed at other developers or end-users of your software/code?

Structure

Using an online editor called readme.so, we selected some typical sections frequently found in R packages:

README file sections selected from https://readme.so/

This selection generates this README file preview template:

We can find room for improvement if we compare this readme.so template with the README file from the rcompendium template.

In this episode, we will complement this template with some key sections.

Callout

We invite you to edit your README as you prefer! You can also use this simple readme.so editor to generate more section templates than the ones we will cover here.

Let’s code

First, let’s Knit the README.Rmd.

We must remember that our README.md is generated from the README.Rmd file. So we need to edit that file and Knit it after any update. This step is not done automatically for this template.

Installation

The Usage section includes the installation steps of:

Clone a repository, and
Use R/Rstudio.

We can assess our target audience and adapt this content to our projects.

Let’s assume that the following personas are examples of the types of people that are your target audience:

Patricia is a PhD student. She uses R to analyse infectious disease data and wants it to be reproducible. She is unfamiliar with GitHub and the terminal window.
Lucia is a Field epidemiologist. She uses R to clean data and create plots for outbreak response. She wants to communicate her doubts and ideas with package maintainers. She does not track the versions of her code with Git.

If we want to add external guides to facilitate the git clone step, we can complement our installation steps with external resources.

Copy, edit as you prefer, and paste it to your README file:

### Usage

First, clone this repository. You can follow [steps on creating a new Rstudio Project from a GitHub repository](https://www.epirhandbook.com/en/version-control-and-collaboration-with-git-and-github.html?q=clone#clone-from-a-github-repository).

Then, run:

Checkpoint

Knit the README.Rmd file.

Callout

Notes are not part of the structure but information about the Usage step. We can add one more # to its heading.

Citation

We can take advantage of the DESCRIPTION file to generate a CITATION file.

First, open the DESCRIPTION file.

Note that in the 5th line, the Authors@R section is already filled with your details. You set this up when running the Configuration steps with rcompendium::set_credentials().

Second, write a Title for the Project in the 3rd line. The Title should be written in sentence case, not ending in a full stop.

Callout

CITATION.cff is file format that facilitates software citation in ecosystems like GitHub, Zenodo and Zotero.

Third, to generate a CITATION.cff file from the DESCRIPTION file, we can install the cffr package:

R

install.packages("cffr")

Fourth, create a .cff file:

R

cffr::cff_write(dependencies = FALSE)

Commit and Push your changes. Identify that GitHub has built-in support for this citation.

How can I paste the CITATION in the README file?

Show me the solution

First, open the CITATION.cff file:

R

usethis::edit_file(path = "CITATION.cff")

Our default CITATION.cff does not record the year of creation. To solve it, we can add this extra line at the end:

date-released: '2023-04-23'

Second, to read the CITATION.cff in the README.Rmd, as in this other tutorial README file:

Paste this template text in the README.Rmd at the Citation section

See [CITATION.cff](CITATION.cff) for citation information,
including a list of authors.
([Read more about the Citation File Format and how to use it](https://citation-file-format.github.io/).)

To cite these tutorials in publications use:

Add this chunk using following chunk options eval=TRUE, echo=FALSE, comment="":

R

cffr::as_bibentry(x = "CITATION.cff")

To include a BibTeX entry for LaTeX users, paste this chunk with options eval=TRUE, echo=FALSE, comment="":

R

utils::toBibtex(cffr::as_bibentry(x = "CITATION.cff"))

Lastly, Knit the README.Rmd file. If you get an error, try installing the latest version of {evaluate} R package.

Licenses

Our project has a GPLv2 license registered in the LICENSE.md file and in the DESCRIPTION file as a GPL (>=2).

We adapted text generated by the {rrtools} package template.

Copy, edit as you prefer, and paste it to your README file:

### Licenses

**Text and figures :**  [CC-BY-4.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Code :** See the [DESCRIPTION](DESCRIPTION) file

**Data :** [CC-0](http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) attribution requested in reuse

Checkpoint

Knit the README.Rmd file.

Contributing

We adapted this format from the template generated from readme.so. We added hyperlinks to redirect to the Community files in the .github/ folder.

Copy, edit as you prefer, and paste it to your README file:

### Contributing

Contributions are always welcome!

See our [Contributing guide](/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md) for ways to get started.

Please adhere to this project's [Code of Conduct](/.github/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).

### Support

Please see our [Getting help guide](/.github/SUPPORT.md) for support.

Checkpoint

Knit the README.Rmd file.

Markdown

In Markdown, the Header 2 generates an underline that can help isolate sections of our chosen structure.

Remove one # from all the main headers. This edit generates a final README file that looks like this:

Discussion

Consider your research project:

Would you add or remove any section from the README template above? Why?

Explore the online editor called readme.so to identify more sections that could suit your research project.

Testimonial

We recommend you to listen to the Code for Thought podcast episode on the README file. They also have a few links that you might find helpful.
For Badges, we recommend reading a Blog post on Communicating development stages of open-source software at the Epiverse-TRACE website.

Checklist

Open science features

We define Open science as making software, data inputs and outputs freely available by publishing all of them with open licences to facilitate project reuse.

A vital feature of this practice is the Licenses. Explicit licenses that include the software and the specific license for text and figures and data, in particular, are also relevant.

Key Points

Complement the README template with Installation steps, Citations, Licenses and Contributing guides.
Use different types of licenses of text and figures, software code, and data.
Licenses is a feature related to Open Science.