Resources

Guides and links for students and researchers: R, Stata, teaching politics, text tools, statistics, data and GIS, writing tools, and research software.

Published

3 November 2026

Quantitative methods

R — Installation, cloud computing options, Quarto publishing setup, and R topic guides.
Stata — NYUAD software downloads, workflow habits, operator reference, and learning guides.
Statistics — Open textbooks, probability primers, z-score tables, and regression interpretation notes.
VPM and Voting Theory — Ranked-choice voting, Condorcet, approval voting, STV, and power-index calculators.

Datasets & mapping

Data — Cross-national surveys, political and economic indicators, archives, and geospatial collections.
GIS — QGIS installation, tutorials, video playlists, plugins, and project-sharing instructions.

Writing & research

Reading & Writing — Guides for political science essays, policy memos, op-eds, and cables.
Research Tools — Reference management with Zotero, note-taking apps, editors, and macOS utilities.

Computing

Operating Systems — macOS, Homebrew package management, Windows training, and coding primers.
TinyTeX — Lightweight LaTeX distribution for rendering R Markdown and Quarto PDFs.
Local LLMs — Tools and step-by-step Ollama installation for running large language models on your own computer, on macOS and Windows.

Topic guides

Focused guides on R and Stata, teaching, text analysis, and methods:

Learning R

Free books, courses, videos, and tutorials for learning R, with three suggested starting points and a guide for Stata users.

Learning Stata

Tutorials, videos, books, and do-file guides for learning Stata, with three suggested starting points.

Teaching Politics

Free simulations, lesson materials, open textbooks, primary sources, and survey guides for teaching and studying politics and international relations.

Text & Corpus Tools

Point-and-click and desktop tools for text analysis, concordances, topic modeling, and handwritten-text recognition, for researchers working without R.

R Workflow and Tools

Editors, project setup, code style, Git and GitHub, containers, and helper packages for working in R with RStudio, Positron, or VS Code.

R Markdown and Reports

Guides, citation tools, templates, and output packages for writing reproducible reports and papers with R Markdown and knitr.

R Data Visualization

Tutorials, color tools, ggplot2 extensions, and interactive chart and map packages for visualizing data in R.

R Data Wrangling and Tables

Guides and packages for cleaning data, working with dates, iterating with purrr, moving data in and out of Excel, and making tables in R.

R Text Analysis

Books, tutorials, topic modeling guides, regular expression tools, and packages for analyzing text in R.

R Web Scraping and APIs

Tutorials and packages for scraping websites, automating browsers, and calling web APIs from R.

R Networks, Conjoint Experiments, and Causal Diagrams

Packages and guides for network analysis, conjoint survey experiments, and causal diagrams in R.

R Packages for Political and Economic Data

R packages and project sites for pulling European, economic, and public-sector data into R.

R Shiny and Dashboards

Books, tools, and examples for building interactive apps and dashboards with Shiny and htmlwidgets.

R Modeling and Machine Learning

Introductions, packages, and guides for statistical modeling, machine learning, and model selection in R.