revtools

0.4.1

Tools to Support Evidence Synthesis

2packages depend

12.2Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

13/13checks pass

Overview

About

Maintained by Martin J. WestgateFirst published 2018-02-065 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

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.

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

Slowest check: 2.7 min · r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang

Code health

None

Tests · ratio 0.00

not tracked

Coverage

97%

Documentation · exports

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-06-09
13 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-06-08
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
OK2026-04-25
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-03-10
11 OK · 3 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMENoVignettesNopkgdown siteNoNEWSNoCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 100%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 95%
References docs: 0%

Downloads

12.2K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #3,952 · ~34/day · ~1K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

69130 days

2.5K90 days

12.2K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on121 r2u88 c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ mjwestgate/revtools

58Stars

25Forks

24Open issues

1Open PRs

6Releases

311Commits

1Contributors

311 commits · Last activity 2026-07-07 · 0% stars, 30d

Stars over time

2025-04-07 · 532026-07-07 · 58

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

Checks run against github.com/mjwestgate/revtools on 2026-07-19.

No development-tooling practices detected in the upstream repository.

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

12 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

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

2direct

0indirect

pcutils searchAnalyzeR

Code & Tests

People & History

People (1)

Maintainer (1)

Martin J. Westgate

Author, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Martin J. Westgate

Author, Maintainer

Listed in earlier versions (1)

Martin J.

no longer listed · 0.3.0 to 0.4.1

Package Timeline

5 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

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
2019-12-17 · current release · diff ↗
0.4.0
2019-07-15 · diff ↗
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
0.3.0
2018-11-29 · diff ↗
R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
0.2.2
2018-03-10 · diff ↗
0.2.1
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
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

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