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psychds

Overview

psychds provides tools for creating, editing, and validating psychological research datasets following the Psych-DS standard. The package includes:

• An interactive Shiny application for building Psych-DS compliant datasets from existing directories
• Functions for validating existing datasets against the standard
• Tools for generating data dictionaries with professional formatting

Installation

From CRAN (not currently available)

install.packages("psychds")

Development version from GitHub

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("psych-ds/psychds-r", dependencies = TRUE)

Quick Start

Launch the Shiny Application

The easiest way to use psychds is through the interactive Shiny app:

library(psychds)
run_psych_ds_app()

This opens a guided interface for:

1. Selecting your project directory and data files
2. Adding dataset metadata (name, description, authors)
3. Standardizing filenames with Psych-DS keywords
4. Generating data dictionaries
5. Validating your dataset
6. Exploring your dataset

Check Dependencies

Before running the app, verify that all required packages are installed:

check_psychds_deps(detailed = TRUE)

Features

📁 Dataset Creation

Build Psych-DS compliant datasets with a step-by-step wizard:

• Select and organize data files
• Auto-detect CSV column structures
• Apply standardized naming conventions
• Generate dataset_description.json metadata

📋 Data Dictionaries

Create professional, human-readable data dictionaries:

• Document all variables with descriptions, types, and constraints
• Include categorical value definitions
• Generate professional readable dictionaries in HTML/PDF

✅ Validation

Validate datasets against the Psych-DS specification:

• Check required files and structure
• Validate JSON metadata against schemas
• Verify data file integrity
• Get detailed error messages and suggestions

The Psych-DS Standard

Psych-DS (Psychological Dataset Standard) provides a specification for organizing behavioral and psychological research data. Key components include:

• dataset_description.json: Metadata about the dataset using Schema.org vocabulary
• data/: Directory containing data files with standardized names
• Keyword-based filenames: e.g., study-attention_session-1_data.csv
• Data dictionaries: Documentation of all variables

Learn more at psych-ds.github.io

Requirements

• R >= 4.1.0
• Required packages: shiny, shinydashboard, shinyjs, DT, jsonlite
• Optional: sortable, zip, pointblank (for full functionality)
• Optional: Node.js >= 18 (for the validate_dataset() command-line validator)

Getting Help

• 📖 Package documentation
• 🐛 Report bugs
• 💬 Discussions
• 📧 Contact the Psych-DS team

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read our Contributing Guide for details on:

• Reporting bugs
• Suggesting features
• Submitting pull requests

Citation

If you use psychds in your research, please cite:

@software{psychds,
  title = {psychds: Tools for Creating and Validating Psych-DS Datasets},
  author = {{Psych-DS Development Team}},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/psych-ds/psychds-r}
}

License

MIT © Psych-DS Development Team

Related Projects

• Psych-DS Docs
• Psych-DS Validator (JavaScript)
• Psych-DS Schema

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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