Introduction to R Software

Course overview

CEBU will not deliver this course live in 2025, but will offer a self-study version of this course (available from Feb 2025). This will only be available to MCRI internal staff. Please contact us for more information.

This course aims to introduce the basics of the R software environment including the graphing capabilities of R using the graphics package within the integrated development environment (IDE) RStudio.

Participants will learn how to create an R script in RStudio, import data into R, clean data, change data and create new variables, manipulate variables, save data, produce simple descriptive statistics, create and customise various graphs, and use R's Help system.

A demonstration of other graphing packages will also be provided briefly.

Course outcomes

After the Introduction to R Software course, students should be able to:

  • Familiarise themselves with the RStudio IDE
  • Import tab or comma-delimited data into R
  • Import Excel, Stata and SPSS data into R
  • Inspect and list the data in an R object 
  • Change data and create new variables
  • Manipulate variables and save data
  • Generate simple descriptive statistics for data
  • Create and customise various graphs including scatterplots, histograms, boxplots, and barplots  
  • Use a script file to run a sequence of R commands
  • Install R packages and update R  
  • Use the R Help system

University of Melbourne
This course is delivered by Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unit (CEBU), a working partnership between Murdoch Children's Research Institute and the University of Melbourne.

Prerequisites

This course was designed for beginning researchers, but it assumes familiarity with computer file management, such as how to recognise different file types by their extensions and how to move files between directories.

Please note: Although R is available for other operating systems such as macOS, the course will be Windows-based.

Course format

  • The Introduction to R Software course will run on two scheduled days.
  • The Friday before the course, the course notes and required files (R files and Excel files) will be made available for students to download.
  • Our course coordinators have recorded a series of short videos between 5-10 minutes which support you in systematically working through the course notes. These are available on Teams for the duration of the course.
  • On each day of the course, one of our course coordinators will do a brief introduction for the day via Teams, and then you can work through the course notes and view the instructional videos at your own pace.
  • Instructors will be available from 9:30am-4:30pm (last questions at 4:00pm) on both days of the course to help you with any questions or difficulties you have while working through the material.

Students will be provided with:

  • Comprehensive course notes, including answers to all exercises
  • Files required for course exercises
  • Optional training videos that cover key concepts in the course notes (available for the week of the course)
  • Quick access to tutors for the two days of the course
  • One-on-one video chats during the course date via request. 

Full course timetable

See our full course timetable below for information on all CEBU courses.

CEBU course timetable

Contact us

Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics Unit (CEBU)
Murdoch Children's Research Institute
The Royal Children's Hospital
50 Flemington Road
Parkville VIC 3052
Australia

Fiona Snashall or Julie Perkins
Email:
Phone: show phone number