How to display coefficients in scientific notation with stargazer

Question

I want to compare the results of different models (lm, glm, plm, pglm) in a table in R using stargazer or a similar tool. However I can't find a way to display the coefficients in scientific notation. This is kind of a problem because the intercept is rather large (about a million) while other coefficients are small (about e-7) which results in lots of useless zeros making it harder to read the table.

I found a similar question here: Format model display in texreg or stargazer R as scientific. But the results there require rescaling the variables and since I use count data I wouldn't want to rescale it.

I am grateful for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Here's a reproducible example:

m1 <- lm(Sepal.Length ~ Petal.Length*Sepal.Width,
         transform(iris, Sepal.Length = Sepal.Length+1e6,
                   Petal.Length=Petal.Length*10, Sepal.Width=Sepal.Width*100))
# Coefficients:
#              (Intercept)              Petal.Length               Sepal.Width  Petal.Length:Sepal.Width  
#                1.000e+06                 7.185e-02                 8.500e-03                -7.701e-05  

I don't believe stargazer has easy support for this. You could try other alternatives like xtable or any of the many options here (I have not tried them all)

library(xtable)
xtable(m1, display=rep('g', 5)) # or there's `digits` too; see `?xtable`

Or if you're using knitr or pandoc I quite like pander, which has automagic scientific notation already (note: this is pandoc output which looks like markdown, not tex output, and then you knit or pandoc to latex/pdf):

library(pander)
pander(m1)