/revtools

Tools to support research synthesis in R

Primary LanguageR

revtools v0.4.1

Tools to support literature review and evidence synthesis in R, including import, de-duplication and interactive display of bibliographic data.

For a complete introduction to revtools you can check out the website; but to get started now you can download revtools either from this site (development version) or CRAN (stable version) as follows:

install.packages("revtools") # install from CRAN
devtools::install_github("mjwestgate/revtools") # install from GitHub
library(revtools) # load

Once you've installed & loaded revtools, you can use any of the inbuilt apps by loading them and drag-and-dropping the data you want to analyse. All the apps export to csv format so you don't need to use R to investigate their results if you'd prefer not to. The apps available in revtools are:

  • screen_duplicates() to investigate potential duplicates within a dataset
  • screen_titles() to screen articles by title
  • screen_abstracts() to screen articles by abstract
  • screen_topics() to run topic models on bibliographic data

If you're a keen to investigate your data in the R workspace, revtools is designed to make data import as straightforward as possible. It does this by using a single function to import bibliographic data from bib, ris, ciw or csv formats:

file_location <- system.file("extdata",
  "avian_ecology_bibliography.ris",
  package = "revtools")

# to import bibliographic information into a data.frame
data <- read_bibliography(file_location)

Then you can pass these data to your apps as you would with any other function:

screen_topics(data) # runs using your data

# you can save progress to the workspace by specifying an object:
result <- screen_topics(data)

# or save to a file within the app, and reload that saved file:
y <- readRDS("saved_object.rds")
screen_topics(y)