congress _ vector ("list", 49) for (i in 1:49){ year _ 1896 + 2*(i-1) file _ paste ("../cong3/", year, ".asc", sep="") data.year _ matrix (scan (file), byrow=T, ncol=5) data.year _ cbind (rep(year, nrow(data.year)), data.year) congress[[i]] _ data.year } for (i in 1:49){ year _ 1896 + 2*(i-1) cond _ abs(congress[[i]][,4])>1 & congress[[i]][,4]!=-9 print (congress[[i]][cond,]) }