query about `msummary()`

[nicholasjhorton]

I had thought that msummary() suppressed the printing of asterisks. But then a student asked in class about this:

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(mosaic))
my_mod <- lm(pcs ~ age, data = HELPrct)
msummary(my_mod)
#>             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
#> (Intercept) 59.45498    2.33875   25.42  < 2e-16 ***
#> age         -0.31993    0.06412   -4.99 8.65e-07 ***
#> 
#> Residual standard error: 10.51 on 451 degrees of freedom
#> Multiple R-squared:  0.05232,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.05021 
#> F-statistic:  24.9 on 1 and 451 DF,  p-value: 8.652e-07

^{Created on 2026-04-01 with reprex v2.1.1}

Are the asterisks here appropriate (given that the legend is suppressed)?

[rpruim]

The asterisks can be suppressed in two ways:

1. Use msummary(..., signif.stars = FALSE) to hide them for a single use.
2. Use options(show.signif.stars = FALSE) to make this the default, since msummary()'s print method uses signif.stars = getOption("show.signif.stars")`.

If we want the ability to control the default for whether the stars are hidden/shown but don't want that default to match getOption("show.signif.stars"), we could introduce a different option to check, perhaps using logic like signif.stars = getOption("msummary.show.signif.stars", default = FALSE) && getOption("show.signif.stars").

I'm working an an update to the package due to a change in {rlang} today, so I could probably do this today if we like the approach.

[rpruim]

Regarding 1 above. It currently needs to be msumary(...) |> print(signif.stars = FALSE) since signif.stars is an argument of print.msummary.lm() not of msummary.lm(). But I'll probably modify msummary.lm() so it saves this information and print.msummary.lm() so that it looks for the stored setting. Ditto for the glm versions.

[rpruim]

Since msummary() and the related print() methods live in {mosaicCore}, I'm going to close this here.

[nicholasjhorton]

I don't have strong feelings either way, but appreciate your considering the question.