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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:

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

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

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