Frequently asked questions

I am new to R and coding but would like to learn how to do my own analyses – do you have any recommendations on where to start?

First of all, congrats and welcome to the community! Coding skills are great to have and although it will be tough at first you will soon find out why coding is so useful!
Having a strong R foundation is key, because everything will be much easier if your code is clean and understandable – by you and others! I can only recommend practice, practice, practice! Have fun with it, try to explore new ways of doing things – I’m constantly learning and improving the way I code by looking at other people’s snippets etc.
If you are looking for specific R tutorials, you can find some of my recommended resources here.

I need help with my analyses – do you offer consulting or bioinformatic services?

Please email me the details!

How can I cite you?

You can cite Biostatsquid the same way you would cite any other website or YouTube video. For example:

Biostatsquid. “ UMAP – simple explanation with an example!” YouTube, Laura Twomey, 14 March. 2025, https://youtu.be/m3s0Tgh8ofg.

Blogposts work the same way, styles can change a bit but essentially you should include: Author(s) Last name, First name. (Year site published/Last updated) ‘Title of message’, Title of internet site, Day Month of posted message. Available at: URL (Accessed Day Month Year). For example:

Twomey, Laura (2025) ‘Easy UMAP – explained with an example’, https://biostatsquid.com/umap-simply-explained/, accessed March 2025.

[code snippet] does not work! Can you help?

In general, it is very difficult to debug code without testing it out yourself. Try to use the data I provide first to see if that works – if it worked for me, then there’s probably something different about your dataset that is causing the bug. The next step is usually to google the error – if you’re having an issue, chances are someone else has had it before, and they probably managed to solve it!

A great platform for programming-related questions and debugging issues is Stack Overflow.

GitHub Discussions is great for debugging when using libraries or open-source projects hosted on GitHub. You can ask questions related to specific repositories, and contributors or other users may help.

If you are still lost, feel free to post a comment or email me, providing a minimal reproducible example. https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example