Summary Scores of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study

Provides functions to compute summary scores (besides proprietary ones) reported in the tabulated data resource that is released by the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study.

ABCDscores

This R package provides functions to compute all non-proprietary summary scores that are included in the tabulated data resource from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study^TM. The ABCD Study^® is the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States, following the biological and behavioral development of over 11,800 children at 21 research sites across the US through adolescence into young adulthood.

To learn more about the study, visit the

• ABCD Study^® website for general information
• ABCD data documentation for detailed information about the data resource
• Data Exploration and Analysis Portal (DEAP) to explore the ABCD data dictionary
• NIH Brain Development Cohorts (NBDC) Data Hub to apply for data access

Versioning

The package major version number (first two digits) matches the ABCD data release version number. For example, the package version 6.0.0 and other 6.0.* versions (e.g., 6.0.1, 6.0.2, etc.) are compatible with the ABCD data release 6.0, 7.0.* package versions are compatible with the ABCD release 7.0, and so forth.

The following table lists which version of the package was used to compute the summary scores in the tabulated data resource for each ABCD data release, starting with the introduction of the package with release 6.0.

Installation

To install the latest version of ABCDscores from CRAN, use the following command:

install.packages("ABCDscores")

To install the latest version of ABCDscores from GitHub, use the following command:

if (!requireNamespace("remotes", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("remotes")
}
  
remotes::install_github("nbdc-datahub/ABCDscores")

To install a specific version of the package, specify the version number in the remotes::install_github() call. For example, to install version 6.0.0, use the following command:

remotes::install_github("nbdc-datahub/[email protected]")

Using tarballs to install

On every new release page of the ABCDscores you can find the source tarballs (tar.gz files) for the corresponding release. If compute environments do not have internet access, you can download the tarballs on a different machine and transfer them to the target environment. Then, use the following command to install the packages from the local tarball files:

install.packages("path/to/ABCDscores_x.y.z.tar.gz", repos = NULL, type = "source")

However, please make sure that all dependencies are already installed in the target environment, as the installation from tarballs does not resolve dependencies automatically, for example, please see the list of dependencies in the DESCRIPTION Imports and Suggests fields.

Usage

For a general overview of how to use the R package to compute summary scores, see the Get Started page. To browse the documentation of all available functions, see the Reference page. For more detailed information about specific summary scores, refer to the vignettes.

Issues

If you encounter issues while using the package, please report them by submitting a GitHub issue. Please do not submit any issues related to the ABCD data resource itself (see ABCD Data documentation for information on how to report issues with the data resource).

Citation

If you use any summary scores from ABCD data release or compute summary scores using this package, please kindly cite the following paper:

Zhang, L., Celhay, O., Das, B., Berman, S., Ziemer, L. R., Smith, C. J., Dale, A. M., & Linkersdörfer, J. (2025). ABCDscores: An R package for computing summary scores in the ABCD Study®. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.04.674066