How to ref stargazer tables in RMarkdown? - r

Question

It seems that stargazer tables cannot be referenced in RMarkdown anymore.
I have unsuccessfully tried to implement the workarounds posted on the github page that refer to this problem https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown/issues/175
---
title: "Ref Stargazer Test"
output:
bookdown::html_document2: default
---
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
```
```{r results='asis'}
m1 <- lm(mpg ~ cyl + disp, mtcars)
stargazer::stargazer(m1, type = "html", label = "tab:model")
```
Table \#ref(tab:model) should show something on cars.
```{r mytab, results="asis"}
stargazer::stargazer(attitude,
type=ifelse(knitr::is_latex_output(),"latex","html"),
label=knitr::opts_current$get("label"),
title="Stargazer <3 Bookdown")
```
As Table \#ref(tab:mytab) shows, relationships may be hard work but love finds a way.
The referencing does not work as of July 2021 (rmarkdown 2.9, bookdown 0.22, stargazer 5.2.2).
Is there another workaround that works?

Answer 1

I don't know how to achieve this with stargazer. I will note that bookdown cross-references are a pretty recent feature, and that stargazer has not been updated in over 3 years, so issues are bound to arise.
One more modern alternative is the modelsummary package (disclaimer: I am the maintainer). In my biased opinion, this package is more flexible and robust, but YMMV.
Below I paste a minimal example of Rmarkdown document with cross-references. A couple things to note:
modelsummary detects the output format automatically, so you only need to specify LaTeX or HTML in the YAML header at the very top of your Rmarkdown document. No need to use the output argument of modelsummary (but check out the documentation anyway!).
The table label is set by the name of the chunk. Here, it is called "model", so we use tab:model as a cross-reference.
Your table needs a title, otherwise cross-references won't show up consistently.
---
title: "modelsummary cross-reference test"
output:
bookdown::html_document2: default
---
```{r model}
library(modelsummary)
m1 <- lm(mpg ~ cyl + disp, mtcars)
modelsummary(m1, title = "A table title")
```
Table \#ref(tab:model) should show something on cars.

Answer 2

I have found a solution myself that works for LaTeX and HTML.
---
title: "Ref Stargazer Test"
output:
bookdown::html_document2: default
---
Table \#ref(tab:mytable) is the referenced table.
```{r mytable, results='asis', fig.cap="This is my table."}
m1 <- lm(mpg ~ cyl + disp, mtcars)
# Use title caption from fig.cap
tit <- knitr::opts_current$get("fig.cap")
# Adding caption for html output
tit_html <- paste0('<span id="tab:',
knitr::opts_current$get("label"),
'">(#tab:',
knitr::opts_current$get("label"),
')</span>',
tit)
stargazer::stargazer(m1,
label = paste0("tab:", knitr::opts_current$get("label")),
title = ifelse(knitr::is_latex_output(), tit, tit_html),
type = ifelse(knitr::is_latex_output(),"latex","html"),
header = F
)
```
You can now also use the fig.cap argument in the chunk header to write the title you want to have for your table. For referencing, you have to refer to the chunk label (in this case "mytable"). The title argument in stargazer creates the <caption> element, this is why the html title is inserted there.

Answer 3

A simple way of solving this is by adding manually your table's name on stargazer.
label = "tab:table4"
So your code should look something like this:
stargazer(m1, label = "tab:mytable")
And now you will be able to cross reference as usual in Rmarkdown \ref{tab:mytable}