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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
  • OSF integration for publishing validated datasets

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:

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
  7. Optionally uploading to OSF

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

☁️ OSF Integration

Upload validated datasets directly to the Open Science Framework:

  • Authenticate with personal access token
  • Create new projects or add to existing ones
  • Preserve folder structure
  • Auto-generate README files

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 >= 4.0.0
  • Required packages: shiny, shinydashboard, shinyjs, shinyFiles, DT, jsonlite
  • Optional: sortable, zip, pointblank (for full functionality)

Getting Help

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 = {2024},
  url = {https://github.com/psych-ds/psychds-r}
}

License

MIT © Psych-DS Development Team