Authors and affiliations in the YAML of RMarkdown

Question

I know this question was already asked in the past in this forum (1, 2, 3). Before you mark this as duplicated, I tried all the answers with no success. Most of the question

Answer 1

There is, to the best of my knowledge, no one-size-fits-it-all solution as of now.

If the target was only PDF, I'd suggest rticles by RStudio. It's great.

A solution which also works with docx is more difficult. One possibility is to use pandoc Lua filters. The repository collecting useful filters contains two filters which will help you: scholarly-metadata and author-info-blocks. (Disclosure: I wrote these.)

Place the .lua files in your directory, change the YAML structure a bit, and instruct pandoc to run the filters:

---
title: "My title"
author:
  - Mario Modesto-Mata:
      email: paleomariomm@gmail.com
      institute: [astro, med]
      correspondence: true
  - name: Christopher
    institute: astro
  - name: Seaghán Mhartain
    institute: med
  - name: Rita Yuri Ynoue
    institute: astro
institute:
  - astro: Instituto de Astronomía, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas, Universidade de São Paulo
  - med: Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo
date: "1 October 2018"
output: 
  word_document:
    toc: yes
    pandoc_args:
      - '--lua-filter=scholarly-metadata.lua'
      - '--lua-filter=author-info-blocks.lua'
  pdf_document: 
    number_sections: yes
    toc: yes
    toc_depth: 4
    pandoc_args:
      - '--lua-filter=scholarly-metadata.lua'
      - '--lua-filter=author-info-blocks.lua'
---

This will be the PDF output:

while this is what it looks like in Word:

The affiliation and contact information is added to the body text, which is why the toc is displayed above it.