revtools v0.4.1

New functions and features

• Improved behaviour of screen_topics:
• Clicking on topics highlights all points in that topic, and renders points from non-selected topics as grey with low opacity
• New 'processing' tab allows manipulation of arguments passed to make_dtm
• More consistent apps:
• Apps that record screening information now do so in a unique column starting with 'selected_', allowing users to determine at which stage articles were excluded during the screening process. New column names are as follows:
• screen_titles stores data in 'selected_titles'
• screen_abstracts stores data in 'selected_abstracts'
• screen_topics stores data in 'selected_topics'
• All apps now use the same naming convention for selection/exclusion (previously screen_topics returned TRUE/FALSE)
• screen_abstracts and screen_titles no longer add 'color' or 'order' columns to exported objects
• Improvements to make_dtm:
• Now accepts objects of class data.frame as an input
• Flexible bigram detection c/o package 'ngram'
• Chooses words for display by number of characters, rather than frequency of occurrence in the dataset
• Allows user-controlled removal (the default) or retention of empty rows
• screen_abstracts automatically moves to the next reference when a selection is made, and hides screened articles by default
• read_bibliography now recognises ris tags from Web of Science (.ciw format)
• add_line_breaks now available as a standalone function, as well as being an argument in format_citation
• objects returned by find_duplicates now include information on the call that created them (via attributes)

Changed defaults

• find_duplicates now searches for exact matches of DOIs by default, or fuzzy matching of article titles if DOIs are missing
• make_dtm now returns an object of slam::simple_triplet_matrix rather than matrix. This can be coerced to a matrix by as.matrix

Bug fixes

• merge_columns should return columns in the same order regardless of order that objects are provided
• Importing multiple files at once no longer generates non-unique 'label' entries, which could cause failure of article citations in screen_topics.
• csv files now import with correct text encoding using read_bibliography
• screen_duplicates loads data.frames correctly from the command line
• data.frames returned by read_bibliography always have snake case column names
• make_dtm now removes all words of three letters or fewer
• Improved behaviour of format_citation

Version 0.4.0

Update to improve interfaces and usability

Change log:

• New functions for working with a team:
  • allocate_effort determines what proportion of articles are given to which reviewers
  • distribute_tasks splits a dataset into sub-sections for each reviewer
  • aggregate_tasks re-joins results from different reviewers
• Updates to importing with read_bibliography:
  • now accepts multiple files in a list (as does merge_columns)
  • unknown column tags are now retained unaltered, rather than grouped into a column labelled 'further_info'
• Updates to screening apps:
  • all have a 'max_file_size' argument allowing the user to upload larger files than previously
  • all screen_ apps now accept multiple file drag-and-drop
  • screen_titles and screen_abstracts now allow user-defined sorting (by choosing a column to sort by)
  • accept/reject and navigation buttons have been relocated to the header bar
  • screen_abstracts now allows navigation by +/- 10 articles
  • screen_topics now allows user-defined exclusion of common and rare terms (ditto make_dtm)

version 0.3.0

Major update to package performance and appearance. Main changes include:

• added shiny apps for screening duplicates, titles or abstracts
• improved topic model control to allow users to interactively select text included in the model
• import functions always return a data.frame by default
• more versatile duplicate detection, including new string matching algorithms
• standardised appearance of shiny apps, including new color scheme and logo

version 0.2.2

This version of revtools includes the following updates over v0.2.1:

1. revtools now uses modals to show when new topic models are being calculated, or when results are saved. This is a marked improvement that lets the user know when the GUI is temporarily inoperative.
2. Cleaner import of .ris files.
3. New argument remove_words allows the user to exclude specific words from the topic model when calling start_review_window. The default is to use tm::stopwords (this was true in v. 0.2.1 as well), so there is no need to add basic stop words each time.
4. Bug fix: Interactively excluding words in start_review_window then running a topic model used to cause mismatches between hover and selected text - this has been fixed.

Note: This release differs slightly from v0.2.2 on CRAN, as it this version still lists SnowballC as a dependency. Consequently, by installing this version you won't be prompted to install SnowballC the first time you run either of the functions make_DTM or start_review_window.

First CRAN version of revtools

This is the first version of revtools on CRAN, and as such is known to pass all R CMD checks on Mac OS X and current and development versions of R on windows (via win-builder).

First version of revtools using plotly

Revtools has been under development for some time, but previously used Shiny and base R plotting. This is the first version to use Plotly for all graphics. This release is for testing purposes only.