Submission group 13: tweetRpoll (R)

Submitting Author: Wenxin Xiang (@xiangwxt), Rada Rudyak (@Radascript), Linh Giang Nguyen (@gn385x) Package Name: tweetRpoll One-Line Description of Package: A R package that allow users to extract and visualize poll data from Twitter! Repository Link: https://github.com/UBC-MDS/tweetRpoll Version submitted: 0.0.0.9000 Reviewer 1: Luming Yang Reviewer 2: Masha Sarafrazi Reviewer 3: Julien Gordon Reviewer 4: Arlin Cherian Submission type: Standard Editor: TBD

DESCRIPTION file:
Package: tweetRpoll
Title: Extract Twitter Poll Data
Version: 0.0.0.9000
Authors@R: 
  c(
    person("Rada", "Rudyak", , "emailrada@gmail.com", role = c("aut", "cre")),
    person("Wenxin", "Xiang", , "theaxiangwx@gmail.com", role = c("aut")),
    person("Linh Giang", "Nguyen", , "giang.nglinh@gmail.com", role = c("aut"))
  )
Description: What the package does (one paragraph).
License: MIT + file LICENSE
Encoding: UTF-8
LazyData: true
Roxygen: list(markdown = TRUE)
RoxygenNote: 7.1.2
Suggests: 
    covr,
    testthat (>= 3.0.0)
Config/testthat/edition: 3
Imports: 
    lubridate,
    ggplot2,
    rlang,
    stats,
    magrittr, 
    tidyverse,
    twitteR,
    httr,
    jsonlite
Scope

Please indicate which category or categories from our package fit policies this package falls under: (Please check an appropriate box below. If you are unsure, we suggest you make a pre-submission inquiry.):

[x] data retrieval

[ ] data extraction

[ ] data munging

[ ] data deposition

[ ] workflow automation

[ ] version control

[ ] citation management and bibliometrics

[ ] scientific software wrappers

[ ] field and lab reproducibility tools

[ ] database software bindings

[ ] geospatial data

[ ] text analysis

Explain how and why the package falls under these categories (briefly, 1-2 sentences):

The package access and download data from online sources Twitter.

Who is the target audience and what are scientific applications of this package?

The package is created for people interested in social media poll studies and social media interaction. Also it's a convenient and helpful tool for R beginners to gain access to the poll data, and make their own data-driven decisions.

Are there other R packages that accomplish the same thing? If so, how does yours differ or meet our criteria for best-in-category?

There are a few existing R packages that have similar functionality for tweets from Twitter. For example, tweetr is a package that helps extract tweets, visualize user sentiment and behaviors on tweet posting, and apply sentiment analysis to the data. However, there are no available packages that work specifically on polls from Twitter.

(If applicable) Does your package comply with our guidance around Ethics, Data Privacy and Human Subjects Research?

Not applicable

If you made a pre-submission inquiry, please paste the link to the corresponding issue, forum post, or other discussion, or @tag the editor you contacted.

Explain reasons for any pkgcheck items which your package is unable to pass.

Not applicable

Technical checks

Confirm each of the following by checking the box.

[x] I have read the guide for authors and rOpenSci packaging guide.

This package:

[x] does not violate the Terms of Service of any service it interacts with.

[x] has a CRAN and OSI accepted license.

[x] contains a README with instructions for installing the development version.

[x] includes documentation with examples for all functions, created with roxygen2.

[x] contains a vignette with examples of its essential functions and uses.

[x] has a test suite.

[x] has continuous integration, including reporting of test coverage using services such as Travis CI, Coveralls and/or CodeCov.

Publication options

[ ] Do you intend for this package to go on CRAN?

[ ] Do you intend for this package to go on Bioconductor?

[ ] Do you wish to submit an Applications Article about your package to Methods in Ecology and Evolution? If so:

MEE Options

Code of conduct

[x] I agree to abide by rOpenSci's Code of Conduct during the review process and in maintaining my package should it be accepted.

Package Review

Please check off boxes as applicable, and elaborate in comments below. Your review is not limited to these topics, as described in the reviewer guide

Briefly describe any working relationship you have (had) with the package authors.
[x] As the reviewer I confirm that there are no conflicts of interest for me to review this work (if you are unsure whether you are in conflict, please speak to your editor before starting your review).

Documentation

The package includes all the following forms of documentation:

[x] A statement of need: clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience in README
[x] Installation instructions: for the development version of the package and any non-standard dependencies in README
[x] Vignette(s): demonstrating major functionality that runs successfully locally
[x] Function Documentation: for all exported functions
[x] Examples: (that run successfully locally) for all exported functions
[x] Community guidelines: including contribution guidelines in the README or CONTRIBUTING, and DESCRIPTION with URL, BugReports and Maintainer (which may be autogenerated via Authors@R).

Functionality

[x] Installation: Installation succeeds as documented.
[x] Functionality: Any functional claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Performance: Any performance claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Automated tests: Unit tests cover essential functions of the package and a reasonable range of inputs and conditions. All tests pass on the local machine.
[x] Packaging guidelines: The package conforms to the rOpenSci packaging guidelines.

Estimated hours spent reviewing:

[x] Should the author(s) deem it appropriate, I agree to be acknowledged as a package reviewer ("rev" role) in the package DESCRIPTION file.

Review Comments

Great job team! Similar to the python package review I agree that this package is definitely valuable to the intended audience as you have mentioned in your documentation. I hope you have used this package to find some interesting analytics from Twitter polls. Overall you have done an excellent job of creating this package, all the checks ran without any issues. The documentation also seems to be clear and concise on the usage of the functions.

The following comments pertain to your package version on Feb 3, 2022 (5:30 pm PST)

My overall suggestion is to maybe provide some more detailed information on how to set a bearer token and provide a guide for that as part of the vignettes. This might make the package more user-friendly. I noticed a link to general instructions was provided in the Python version of the package. But this is missing in the R version.
Under related packages, you refer to tweetr package. However, I couldn’t find this package online. I wonder if you are referring to twitteR package? In which case, I would also suggest adding a URL to this package.
Is there a plan to publish this package on CRAN? If not, maybe the CRAN installation part is not essential in the readme file. If you are, that’s amazing, good job!
You could also add a code coverage badge on your readme file. This option can be found in the settings tab in codecov.io
Minor suggestion: When referring to tweet ID, in some function documentation it is mentioned as "id" and in some others, upper case ("ID"). Maybe this could be consistently kept as ID.
In the vignette, you use the example get_poll_by_id(1239677495487737856) and it returns the output as a list. However, the documentation mentions that this argument is a character type. When I try some of the other ID’s printed by the first function without the single quotes around it, it gives me an error. So I am wondering why this specific ID used in the vignette returns the output without error while the other ones do not? If I have missed something here, please feel free to correct me.
One other suggestion might be to provide users with the option to alter the size of the bar charts. It seems like it prints a standard size but maybe for aesthetic purposes, users may want to alter that so having that functionality would be nice.
In the test file for get_poll_by_id, a minor spelling error on line 36. it should be ‘non-existent’ instead.
In the description file, the description part hasn’t been updated yet. It still says “What the package does (one paragraph).”

You have done an excellent job on this package! It was really intriguing reading your code and understanding the functionality of your package. Looking forward to newer versions of this package!

title: "review" output: rmarkdown::md_document: pandoc_args: [ "--wrap=none" ]

Package Review

Please check off boxes as applicable, and elaborate in comments below. Your review is not limited to these topics, as described in the reviewer guide

Briefly describe any working relationship you have (had) with the package authors.
[x] As the reviewer I confirm that there are no conflicts of interest for me to review this work (if you are unsure whether you are in conflict, please speak to your editor before starting your review).

Documentation

The package includes all the following forms of documentation:

[x] A statement of need: clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience in README
[x] Installation instructions: for the development version of package and any non-standard dependencies in README
[x] Vignette(s): demonstrating major functionality that runs successfully locally
[x] Function Documentation: for all exported functions
[x] Examples: (that run successfully locally) for all exported functions
[x] Community guidelines: including contribution guidelines in the README or CONTRIBUTING, and DESCRIPTION with URL, BugReports and Maintainer (which may be autogenerated via Authors@R).

Functionality

[x] Installation: Installation succeeds as documented.
[x] Functionality: Any functional claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Performance: Any performance claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Automated tests: Unit tests cover essential functions of the package and a reasonable range of inputs and conditions. All tests pass on the local machine.
[x] Packaging guidelines: The package conforms to the rOpenSci packaging guidelines.

Estimated hours spent reviewing:

30 mins

[x] Should the author(s) deem it appropriate, I agree to be acknowledged as a package reviewer ("rev" role) in the package DESCRIPTION file.

Review Comments

Great job team! Echoing my comments in the Python review that I really see the research value this has in terms of making it really easy and reproducible to use twitter data. I can see auto-updating dashboards that build off of the funcitonality in this package. Vignette was well done and made it easy to review.

Some constructive feedback:

Testing seemed to show that the visualize_poll() tests were not actually being tested with test(). Note the 0 in the passed tests. Bit of an odd issue that I may just be misinterpreting, but just reporting my findings that this seems a bit odd and perhaps should be addressed.
Echoing my comments from Python review, your overview section is underselling your package a bit. You could talk about the reproducibility and batch processing efficiency gains that can be achieved through using your package.
This may not need to be addressed, but the installation of the package took several minutes--much longer than any other package I've installed previously. Perhaps you could be more selective of which dependencies or imports you are using? I am not that good at software dev so I'm not sure why the installation was so long but again perhaps something to look into.
Also echoing my comments from the Python review, the string in the title output of the plots could be automatically processed so that they wrap around using line breaks. This would help it look more professional.
Code of conduct link in the contributing page leads to a 404 dead link
(already covered by previous reviewers) CRAN installation can be removed in the Readme and the code coverage badge can be added.

Once again thank you for producing this package, it was a pleasure to review.

Package Review

Please check off boxes as applicable, and elaborate in comments below. Your review is not limited to these topics, as described in the reviewer guide

Briefly describe any working relationship you have (had) with the package authors.
[x] As the reviewer I confirm that there are no conflicts of interest for me to review this work (if you are unsure whether you are in conflict, please speak to your editor before starting your review).

Documentation

The package includes all the following forms of documentation:

[x] A statement of need: clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience in README
[x] Installation instructions: for the development version of package and any non-standard dependencies in README
[x] Vignette(s): demonstrating major functionality that runs successfully locally
[x] Function Documentation: for all exported functions
[x] Examples: (that run successfully locally) for all exported functions
[x] Community guidelines: including contribution guidelines in the README or CONTRIBUTING, and DESCRIPTION with URL, BugReports and Maintainer (which may be autogenerated via Authors@R).

Functionality

[x] Installation: Installation succeeds as documented.
[x] Functionality: Any functional claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Performance: Any performance claims of the software been confirmed.
[x] Automated tests: Unit tests cover essential functions of the package and a reasonable range of inputs and conditions. All tests pass on the local machine.
[x] Packaging guidelines: The package conforms to the rOpenSci packaging guidelines.

Estimated hours spent reviewing: 1.5 hour

[x] Should the author(s) deem it appropriate, I agree to be acknowledged as a package reviewer ("rev" role) in the package DESCRIPTION file.

Review Comments

I enjoy this package idea, and I think it is very creative and could be of great help to visualize the poll results especially for someone who checks for poll results frequently. Here are some observations from my review and I hope these will help with further improvement of the package.

I got the following warning when installing the package from CRAN as instructed in the Readme. Warning in install.packages : package ‘tweetRpoll’ is not available for this version of R ; I am using this R version R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01) -- "Bird Hippie" If installing from CRAN is not working as expected, it might be better to remove this instruction from the Readme file since it was not required.
By the time of this review, there are 8 active branches in the repository, and I think it is general good practice to close out the completed branches and use issues to communicate if there is any further features to be added via branches.
There exists minor inconsistency In the Roxygen of the get_poll_by_id function. The general description states the function returns data frame, while the returned parameter is actually list.
While testing the function get_poll_by_id with the output ID from the first function, most of the tests encountered Request returned error error. The error message itself is not very informative and could be confusing. However, there was a good error message suggesting that tweet does not contain a poll, which makes more sense. It might be helpful if the function could point out what's wrong the input ID and why this error was raised.
When running the following two lines of code, the y label in the visualization graph was not rendered properly. For better visualizations, it might be helpful to consider checking the authorized types of characters in the labels.
```
poll_info <- get_poll_by_id(1233970022109892608)
visualize_poll(poll_info)
```

Package Review

Please check off boxes as applicable, and elaborate in comments below. Your review is not limited to these topics, as described in the reviewer guide

Briefly describe any working relationship you have (had) with the package authors.
[x] As the reviewer I confirm that there are no conflicts of interest for me to review this work (if you are unsure whether you are in conflict, please speak to your editor before starting your review).

Documentation

The package includes all the following forms of documentation:

[x] A statement of need: clearly stating problems the software is designed to solve and its target audience in README
[x] Installation instructions: for the development version of the package and any non-standard dependencies in README
[x] Vignette(s): demonstrating major functionality that runs successfully locally
[x] Function Documentation: for all exported functions
[x] Examples: (that run successfully locally) for all exported functions
[x] Community guidelines: including contribution guidelines in the README or CONTRIBUTING, and DESCRIPTION with URL, BugReports and Maintainer (which may be autogenerated via Authors@R).

Functionality

[x] Installation: Installation succeeds as documented.
[x] Functionality: Any functional claims of the software have been confirmed.
[x] Performance: Any performance claims of the software have been confirmed.
[x] Automated tests: Unit tests cover essential functions of the package and a reasonable range of inputs and conditions. All tests pass on the local machine.
[x] Packaging guidelines: The package conforms to the rOpenSci packaging guidelines.

Estimated hours spent reviewing: 1 hour

[x] Should the author(s) deem it appropriate, I agree to be acknowledged as a package reviewer ("rev" role) in the package DESCRIPTION file.

Review Comments

Great work overall! Appreciate the effort all of you have been put into the development of this package. Here're some places that I think can be improved:

It would be better by showing some function results along with pictures, tables if any in the Features block under README to provide users with a more clear and straightforward overview of this package, instead of writing descriptions with sentences only.
Although your package is completed, you have one to-do card in your project Kanban. I think you can put it in "Done" list if you are done with ci-cd.
The last few lines of get_tweet_by_id() contain some comments . Although they have been commented out, you should still consider removing them from your source code. If you believe this is something useful for demonstration, you can put it in your documentation instead.
The installation instructions in README say the package can be installed from CRAN while it is not. Therefore, you should consider removing the CRAN part and just leave the GitHub installation instruction there.
Although I see vignettes in your repo, you have not put a link to it in README so that people can see the full example of your package, I recommend adding it.

UBC-MDS / software-review-2022