R Observatory: Metrics for revtools version 0.4.1

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

revtools

0.4.1Package record

Tools to Support Evidence Synthesis

0packages dependsuggested by 2

11Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

13/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Martin J. WestgateCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗Website ↗Issues ↗

Researchers commonly need to summarize scientific information, a process known as 'evidence synthesis'. The first stage of a synthesis process (such as a systematic review or meta-analysis) is to download a list of references from academic search engines such as 'Web of Knowledge' or 'Scopus'. The traditional approach to systematic review is then to sort these data manually, first by locating and removing duplicated entries, and then screening to remove irrelevant content by viewing titles and abstracts (in that order). 'revtools' provides interfaces for each of these tasks. An alternative approach, however, is to draw on tools from machine learning to visualise patterns in the corpus. In this case, you can use 'revtools' to render ordinations of text drawn from article titles, keywords and abstracts, and interactively select or exclude individual references, words or topics.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)

install.packages("revtools", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("mjwestgate/revtools")

Development version from mjwestgate/revtools. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-revtools

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-revtools

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 2.5 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

OK13 OK2026-08-05
NOTE12 OK, 1 NOTE2026-08-01
OK13 OK2026-06-09
ERROR12 OK, 1 ERROR2026-06-08
OK12 OK2026-04-25

Show 1 earlier changeHide 1 earlier change

NOTE11 OK, 3 NOTE2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.4.1

README· In the repository, left out of the releaseVignettesNoNEWSNoCitation fileYes · cites a publicationWebsiteYes

Help pages: 25includes a package overview page
Examples that run: 100%20 run in a plain check
Exported functions with examples: 95%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 95%
Help pages citing references: 0%

How these are measured

Downloads

11K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #3,876 · ~30/day · ~918/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

90530 days

2.4K90 days

11K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on120 r2u153 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Repository

mjwestgate/revtools ↗Account: mjwestgate

59Stars

25Forks

24Open issues

1Open PRs

6Releases

311Commits

1Commit identities

311 commits · Last activity 2020-01-10 · 0% stars, 30d

Responsiveness

How these are sampled

PRs merged (all time): 83%
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed issues: 22
Median days to close, 50 most recently updated closed PRs: 0

Stars over time

2025-09-19 · 552026-07-28 · 59

How these are measured

PracticesBeta

Checks run against github.com/mjwestgate/revtools on 2026-10-18.

No development-tooling practices detected in the upstream repository.

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v3 (2026-09-26)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

12 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing revtools adds 84 packages (48 with compiled code, 94 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: BH 14 MB, stringi 11 MB, ggplot2 6.0 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 3.5.0

Imports (12)

ade4 modeltools ngram plotly slam shiny shinydashboard SnowballC stringdist tm topicmodels viridisLite

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (0)

none

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Suggested by 2

Suggests, most downloaded first

pcutils searchAnalyzeR

How these are counted

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Martin J. Westgate

Author, Maintainer since 0.2.1 (2018)

Listed in earlier versions (1)

Martin J.

no longer listed · 0.3.0 to 0.4.1

Releases (5)

Pick two releases to compare their code metrics.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
0.4.1Latest
record
2019-12-17 · current release · diff ↗ ·
removed 3 exports
make_DTM, run_LDA, start_review_window

added 1 export
add_line_breaks
0.4.0
record
2019-07-15 · diff ↗ ·
added 3 exports
allocate_effort, distribute_tasks, aggregate_tasks
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.3.0
record
2018-11-29 · diff ↗ ·
removed 1 export
summary.review_info

added 19 exports
c.bibliography, tag_lookup, format_citation, format_citation.bibliography, format_citation.data.frame, format_citation.list, fuzzdist, fuzz_m_ratio, fuzz_partial_ratio, fuzz_token_sort_ratio, fuzz_token_set_ratio, merge_columns, make_dtm, run_topic_model, revwords, screen_duplicates, screen_titles, screen_abstracts, screen_topics
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
0.2.2
record
2018-03-10 · diff ↗
0.2.1
record
2018-02-06
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21

Package metadata

First published: 2018-02-06
Total releases: 5 / 8 yrs
License: GPL-3 OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.5.0
Download size: 138 KB

Appears in task views

Meta-Analysis

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' preferred citation:

citation("revtools")

The package provides a citation file that builds its entry when R runs it. Run citation() to see it.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for revtools version 0.4.1 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-21. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-21, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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