Systematic theory development: a rigorous, reproducible workflow for
building, developing and testing scientific theories. This is the
feature-parity twin of the Python
package of the same name. The two implementations produce identical
verdicts and byte-identical diagram intermediate representations (see
?theoryforge for the shared specification behind that
guarantee).
Run the package in your browser, with no installation, using the interactive web app. It executes the real package client-side via webR, so you can load a theory and run the operations it offers, from the rigour checklist through to the literature map, then export the visualisation (SVG/PNG) together with the R code that reproduces it.
The package is not on CRAN yet, so it installs from GitHub, pointing at its subdirectory in the monorepo it shares with its Python twin:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("pablobernabeu/theoryforge", subdir = "r/theoryforge")From a local checkout, the package also installs as source:
# from the repository root
install.packages("r/theoryforge", repos = NULL, type = "source")The package depends on yaml and
jsonlite.
library(theoryforge)
# Read a bundled example theory (or build one incrementally with tf_theory + tf_add_*)
theory <- tf_read(system.file("fixtures", "panic-network.theory.yaml",
package = "theoryforge"))
tf_validate(theory)
# Score it against the 12-item rigour checklist
report <- tf_check(theory)
report$aggregate_score # 84.8
report$gate # "pass"Get started walks through building, checking and diagramming a theory. Developing and testing continues into severity, implied conditional independencies, preregistration, amendment appraisal and the audit dossier, and Mapping the literature positions a theory within a bibliometric corpus.
The reference
index lists every exported function, grouped by workflow stage.
tf_render_diagram() renders any digraph view in the viewer
through DiagrammeR, or as a standalone SVG string with
as = "svg". The rendering packages sit in Suggests rather
than Imports, so the deterministic core carries no dependency on them.
For the rationale behind each rigour check and exactly how every
reported value is computed, see Methodological
foundations.
citation("theoryforge")The About
page carries the same citation with a BibTeX entry, and a short note
on the developer. The repository also ships CITATION.cff,
which drives GitHub’s ‘Cite this repository’ button.
MIT. See LICENSE.
Issues and pull requests are welcome. The contributing guide describes the development setup and the conventions the package follows, and everyone taking part is asked to honour the Code of Conduct.
Continuous integration runs R CMD check --as-cran in six
configurations, covering macOS, Windows and Ubuntu on the released R,
Windows and Ubuntu on R-devel and Ubuntu on oldrel-1, with a further job
running the suite on the declared R 4.1 minimum. The Python suite and
the cross-language parity check run alongside them, so a change that
breaks the twin is caught on the same push.