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palaeoverse: A community‐driven R package to support palaeobiological analysis

Jones, Lewis A; Gearty, William; Allen, Bethany J; Eichenseer, Kilian; Dean, Christopher D; Galván, Sofía; Kouvari, Miranta; ... Chiarenza, Alfio Alessandro; + view all (2023) palaeoverse: A community‐driven R package to support palaeobiological analysis. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 10.1111/2041-210x.14099. Green open access

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Abstract

1. The open-source programming language ‘R' has become a standard tool in the palaeobiologist's toolkit. Its popularity within the palaeobiological community continues to grow, with published articles increasingly citing the usage of R and R packages. However, there are currently a lack of agreed standards for data preparation and available frameworks to support the implementation of such standards. Consequently, data preparation workflows are often unclear and not reproducible, even when code is provided. Moreover, due to a lack of code accessibility and documentation, palaeobiologists are often forced to ‘reinvent the wheel’ to find solutions to issues already solved by other members of the community. 2. Here, we introduce palaeoverse, a community-driven R package to aid data preparation and exploration for quantitative palaeobiological research. The package is freely available and has three core principles: (1) streamline data preparation and analyses; (2) enhance code readability; and (3) improve reproducibility of results. To develop these aims, we assessed the analytical needs of the broader palaeobiological community using an online survey, in addition to incorporating our own experiences. 3. In this work, we first report the findings of the survey, which shaped the development of the package. Subsequently, we describe and demonstrate the functionality available in palaeoverse and provide usage examples. Finally, we discuss the resources we have made available for the community and our future plans for the broader Palaeoverse project. 4. palaeoverse is a community-driven R package for palaeobiology, developed with the intention of bringing palaeobiologists together to establish agreed standards for high-quality quantitative research. The package provides a user-friendly platform for preparing data for analysis with well-documented open-source code to enhance transparency. The functionality available in palaeoverse improves code reproducibility and accessibility, which is beneficial for both the review process and future research.

Type: Article
Title: palaeoverse: A community‐driven R package to support palaeobiological analysis
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/2041-210x.14099
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14099
Language: English
Additional information: This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2023 The Authors. Methods in Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.
Keywords: analytical palaeobiology, computational palaeobiology, R programming, readable, reproducible, reusable
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Earth Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10168647
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