Use of R package review guidelines in independent manuscript review

Package or resource used

rOpenSci package development guide book

URL or code snippet for your use case

https://ropensci.org/blog/2019/04/18/wild-standards/

Image

Sector

academic

Field(s) of application

academic manuscript review

What did you do?

Quoted from Hao Ye @hye in the blog post:

When I was asked to review the code for the pavo 2.0 manuscript1, I had an initial moment of panic – I had no experience doing formal code review. Luckily, I knew that rOpenSci had a set of reviewing guidelines, and that a few MEE Applications papers had used them. The same guidelines are also used by the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). Although this submission wasn’t flagged for rOpenSci review, I didn’t see a conflict with using their guidelines for my task.

The checklist helped me to organise my review. I started with the basic package review template, and then focused on a detailed look at the primary vignette (which is where I expect most users start). The rOpenSci guidelines encourage the use of some automated tools, like goodpractice to facilitate reviewing. The hardest part was providing suggestions to address what the goodpractice::gp() function flagged as complex or redundant code. The remainder of the review went pretty smoothly. I’m a fan of task checklists, so I’m glad that the authors found my comments useful. Hopefully the changes will help with the future maintenance of the package."