clerkR

Publication-ready tables for biomedical research in R

R Package
Tables
Reproducible Research
Open Source
An R package that transforms standard data frames into publication-ready tables for biomedical and neuroscience manuscripts — descriptive/Table 1, heritability, correlation, and regression archetypes — with consistent theming and a unified rendering pipeline for Word/PDF, HTML, and LaTeX.
Published

July 3, 2026

About

clerkR transforms standard R data frames into publication-ready tables for biomedical and neuroscience manuscripts. Rather than wrestling with formatting each time, clerkR reduces the most common table types to a handful of opinionated constructor functions that share consistent theming, domain grouping, footnote handling, and a unified rendering pipeline for Word/PDF (gt), interactive HTML (reactable), and LaTeX output.

A clerk keeps tabs — clerkR keeps yours publication-ready.

Table Archetypes

Function Use case Example
tbl_descriptive() Sample characteristics by group, mean ± SD, t/χ² Table 1
tbl_simple() Descriptive summary, no inferential test Supplementary table
tbl_correlation() Partial correlations, r, p, p† Correlation results
tbl_regression() β, SE, 95% CI, p, FDR — accepts broom::tidy() Linear/logistic models
tbl_heritability() h², 95% CI, LRT p, σ²a/σ²e — accepts herit_batch() Heritability results

Quick Example

library(clerkR)

tbl_descriptive(
  clerk_example,
  group   = sex,
  domains = list(
    "Metabolic"      = c("hdl", "glucose", "bmi"),
    "Anthropometric" = c("waist", "systolic_bp"),
    "Cognitive"      = c("tmt_time", "verbal_fluency"),
    "Mental health"  = c("bdi", "panas_neg", "life_satisfaction")
  ),
  log_vars = "tmt_time",
  fdr      = TRUE,
  output   = "gt"
) |>
  clerk_render(title = "Table 1. Sample characteristics by sex")

clerkR is R-itable compatible — the output of herit_batch() pipes straight into tbl_heritability():

herit_batch(traits, grm = A, data = dat, covs_list = covs_list) |>
  tbl_heritability(
    model    = "covariates",
    sigma2_a = "sigma2_a",
    sigma2_e = "sigma2_e",
    fdr      = TRUE,
    output   = "gt"
  ) |>
  clerk_render(title = "Heritability estimates")

Features

  • Five table archetypes covering ~90% of what appears in a biomed paper
  • The clerkR theme — light teal headers, navy text, clean borders, consistent throughout
  • Domain/section grouping — organise rows under labelled section headers
  • Automatic footnotes for log-transformed variables and FDR correction
  • Three render targets — gt for Word/PDF, reactable for HTML, LaTeX for manuscripts
  • Output baked in at construction — set output = "gt" once, then just |> clerk_render()
  • All constructors return a composable clerk_tbl S3 object