Aaron Gullickson
This is my starting template for a research project, designed for plain text science. This template assumes the analysis is primarily powered by R and R Markdown, but is flexible enough to incorporate other programs. The structure and organization is heavily influenced by the ideas from Code and Data for the Social Sciences: A Practitioner's Guide by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro. Each directory in this repository contains a README detailing organizational principles. It is assumed that these READMEs will be overwritten with project specific information when this template is used as a starter for a project.
At the top level, I divide my project into an analysis directory which contains all of the raw input data, constructed data, and scripts to perform the analysis and a products directory which contains all the R Markdown or LaTeX files and associated resources necessary to produce papers and presentations. I separate these two aspects of the research project because it is assumed that the paper will only contain a subset of the full analysis and I may spend more time at this stage to clean up and prettify tables and figures than for the actual analysis.
To start a new project from this template, copy and paste contents to a new directory, or clone, and remove the .git directory.