# Data Science for Psychologists (ds4psy)

Welcome to the R package ds4psy — a software companion to the books and courses Data Science for Psychologists and Introduction to Data Science.

### R package

The R package ds4psy provides datasets and functions used in books and courses that teach R and the basics of data science to a variety of audiences. Its source code is hosted at https://github.com/hneth/ds4psy.

### Textbooks

The R package ds4psy is used by the following textbooks that are freely available at https://connect.posit.cloud/hneth/:

- The ds4psy book is available at https://hneth-ds4psy.share.connect.posit.cloud/
- The i2ds book is available at https://hneth-i2ds.share.connect.posit.cloud/

These books and courses introduce the principles and methods of data science for students of psychology and other biological or social sciences.

### Change of hosting service and URLs

Both textbooks were originally hosted at https://bookdown.org (up to 2026-01-15). Static versions are still available at https://bookdown.org/hneth/ds4psy/ and https://bookdown.org/hneth/i2ds/, respectively, but these are no longer updated.

Future versions will be hosted at https://connect.posit.cloud/hneth/. Hence, visit https://hneth-ds4psy.share.connect.posit.cloud/ and https://hneth-i2ds.share.connect.posit.cloud/ for the most recent versions.

## The ds4psy and i2ds books, courses, and R package

The ds4psy book and course provide an introduction to data science that is tailored to the needs of psychologists, but is also suitable for students of the humanities and other biological or social sciences. The i2ds book and corresponding courses provide similar contents in a more extensive and updated form.

The audience of these materials typically has some knowledge of statistics, but rarely an idea how data is prepared and shaped to allow for statistical testing. By using various data types and working with many examples, we teach tools for transforming, summarizing, and visualizing data. By keeping our eyes open for the perils of misleading representations, the book fosters fundamental skills of data literacy and cultivates reproducible research practices that enable and precede any practical use of statistics.

The R package ds4psy primarily provides datasets, but also functions for data generation and manipulation (e.g., of text and time data) and graphics that are used in the book and its exercises. All functions included in ds4psy are designed to be explicit and instructive, rather than efficient or elegant.

## Installation

The current release of ds4psy is available from CRAN at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ds4psy:

    install.packages('ds4psy')  # install ds4psy from CRAN client
    library('ds4psy')           # load to use the package

The current development version can be installed from its GitHub repository at https://github.com/hneth/ds4psy/:

    # install.packages('devtools')  # (if not installed yet)
    devtools::install_github('hneth/ds4psy')
    library('ds4psy')  # load to use the package

## Resources

This R package and the corresponding books and courses are still being developed and are updated as new materials become available.

- The current version of Introduction to Data Science is available online at https://hneth-i2ds.share.connect.posit.cloud/.

- A version of the Data science for psychologists book is available online at https://hneth-ds4psy.share.connect.posit.cloud/.

- The current R package ds4psy is available at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ds4psy.

These books and courses were originally based on the classic textbook:

- Wickham, H., & Grolemund, G. (2017). R for data science: Import, tidy, transform, visualize, and model data. Sebastopol, Canada: O’Reilly Media, Inc. (available online at https://r4ds.had.co.nz/)

but provide more base R and less tidyverse content.

- For ds4psy sources, there are two GitHub repositories to be distinguished:

  - The repository for the ds4psy book is https://github.com/hneth/ds4psy (with an additional suffix `_book`).

  - The repository for the ds4psy package is https://github.com/hneth/ds4psy.

## About

If you find these materials useful, or want to adopt or alter them for your purposes, please let me know.

### Citation

To cite ds4psy in derivations and publications, please use:

- Neth, H. (2026). ds4psy: Data Science for Psychologists.
  Social Psychology and Decision Sciences, University of Konstanz, Germany.
  Textbook and R package (version 1.3.0, April 22, 2026).
  Retrieved from https://hneth-ds4psy.share.connect.posit.cloud/.
  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7229812

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is:

    @Manual{ds4psy,
      title = {ds4psy: Data Science for Psychologists},
      author = {Hansjörg Neth},
      year = {2026},
      organization = {Social Psychology and Decision Sciences, University of Konstanz},
      address = {Konstanz, Germany},
      note = {R package (version 1.3.0, April 22, 2026); Textbook at <https://hneth-ds4psy.share.connect.posit.cloud/>.},
      url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ds4psy},
      doi = {10.5281/zenodo.7229812}
    }

### License

Data science for psychologists (ds4psy) by Hansjörg Neth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[Updated 2026-04-22 by hn.]