REDCap (Research Data Capture) developed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center is a widely used web-hosted research data capture and reporting tool for web data and mobile devide data entry. It is build for tightly designed and quality-controlled experiments as well as for observational surveys. REDCap stores metadata that are useful to statistical analysis systems, and the system exports data manually to csv
, R
, Stata
, SPSS
, SAS
and other systems and through an API that is used by many R users, using the redcapAPI , REDCapR, and REDCapExporter packages. This topic focuses on redcapAPI
since it was developed at Vanderbilt and the team supporting it regularly engages with the REDCap
development team.
The redcapAPI
R package works closely with another R package developed at Vanderbilt, rccola
which is used to safely manage user authentication for live REDCap
interaction through an API.
This topic is intended to help R users develop best practices for working with data from REDCap
, and to have discussions and deal with questions about R programming for working with REDCap
. It is also intended to lead to a “meta” R package that encompasses these best practices.
Managing a project that involves REDCap with analysis in R is mostly ad-hoc. We would like to bring together best practices, and pull together resources / scripts to create a much smoother workflow, which eventually will become a CRAN package.
Outline of functions needed:
Structure
Creation- given a specification create all forms in REDCap database
Update- given a specification update a REDCap database to match the new specification
Export- given a REDCap API key, return a structure that can be used by Creation and Update
Quality Control - Given a REDCap API Key provide a markdown report of possible issues.
Missing Translation
Missing Suffix
HTML in variable Name
Test / Production mismatches (see 1c above)
Dropdowns with no entries
.... (Need a lot of help-- anyone with scripts to detect problems, please share)
Interface
An `rccola` compatible interface with proper labeling/ cleanup.
This is the basic outline. We are looking for top level discussion proposed purpose and any low level useful details that fit inside this scope, and pointers to other R resources related to REDCap
.
Currently Available R Resources
- redcapAPI package
- rccola package
- Automatic cleaning up datasets after manual
REDCap
export to R using theimportREDCap
function: R WorkflowREDCap
tab - Automatic reformatting of data tables (e.g., to recombine multiple choices back into one variable as it originally appeared on a case report form) using the
cleanupREDCap
function, and structuring data tables when the project has a mixture of longitudinal and baseline-only forms: R WorkflowREDCap
tab - Using an external file (possibly version controlled in
Github
) and therunDeriveExpr
function to specify post-import derived variable formulas and metadata: R Workflow - mooonpie
- Saving imported datasets for fast retrieval