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:

Selecting your project directory and data files
Adding dataset metadata (name, description, authors)
Standardizing filenames with Psych-DS keywords
Generating data dictionaries
Validating your dataset
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}
}