Data quality assessments (DQA) are necessary to ensure valid research results. Despite the growing availability of tools of relevance for DQA in the R language, a systematic comparison of their functionalities is missing. Therefore, we review R packages related to data quality (DQ) and assess their scope against a DQ framework for observational health studies. Based on a systematic search, we screened more than 140 R packages related to DQA in the Comprehensive R Archive Network. From these, we selected packages which target at least three of the four DQ dimensions (integrity, completeness, consistency, accuracy) in a reference framework. We evaluated the resulting 27 packages for general features (e.g., usability, metadata handling, output types, descriptive statistics) and the possible assessment’s breadth. To facilitate comparisons, we applied all packages to a publicly available dataset from a cohort study. We found that the packages’ scope varies considerably regarding functionalities and usability. Only three packages follow a DQ concept, and some offer an extensive rule-based issue analysis. However, the reference framework does not include a few implemented functionalities, and it should be broadened accordingly. Improved use of metadata to empower DQA and user-friendliness enhancement, such as GUIs and reports that grade the severity of DQ issues, stand out as the main directions for future developments.

The difficulty to find new drugs and bring them to the market has led to an increased interest to find new applications for known compounds. Biological samples from many disease contexts have been extensively profiled by transcriptomics, and, intuitively, this motivates to search for compounds with a reversing effect on the expression of characteristic disease genes. However, disease effects may be cell line-specific and also depend on other factors, such as genetics and environment. Transcription profile changes between healthy and diseased cells relate in complex ways to profile changes gathered from cell lines upon stimulation with a drug. Despite these differences, we expect that there will be some similarity in the gene regulatory networks at play in both situations. The challenge is to match transcriptomes for both diseases and drugs alike, even though the exact molecular pathology/pharmacogenomics may not be known. We substitute the challenge to match a drug effect to a disease effect with the challenge to match a drug effect to the effect of the same drug at another concentration or in another cell line. This is welldefined, reproducible in vitro and in silico and extendable with external data. Based on the Connectivity Map (CMap) dataset, we combined 26 different similarity scores with six different heuristics to reduce the number of genes in the model. Such gene filters may also utilize external knowledge e.g. from biological networks. We found that no similarity score always outperforms all others for all drugs, but the Pearson correlation finds the same drug with the highest reliability. Results are improved by filtering for highly expressed genes and to a lesser degree for genes with large fold changes. Also a network-based reduction of contributing transcripts was beneficial, here implemented by the FocusHeuristics. We found no drop in prediction accuracy when reducing the whole transcriptome to the set of 1000 landmark genes of the CMap’s successor project Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures. All source code to re-analyze and extend the CMap data, the source code of heuristics, filters and their evaluation are available to propel the development of new methods for drug repurposing. https://bitbucket.org/ibima/moldrugeffectsdb steffen.moeller@uni-rostock.de Supplementary data are available at Briefings in Bioinformatics online.

DataquieR version 2 is a major update to the dataquieR package (Richter et al., 2021). It enables extensive, highly standardized, and accessible data quality assessments related to data integrity (such as data type errors or duplicates), completeness (for example, missing values), consistency (for instance, range violations or contradictions), and accuracy (such as time trends or examiner effects) on tabular form data. This update extends the coverage of data quality indicators from the underlying framework (Schmidt et al., 2021) based on a substantially improved information model. It furthermore comprises performance enhancements, interactive output, and versatile options to grade data quality issues. The broader framework coverage is achieved by integrating dataquieR 2 with a differentiated metadata schema. This spreadsheet-type schema includes descriptions, expectations and requirements about the following data objects in a machine-readable way: (1) single variables and data fields, (2) combinations of variables, (3) segments of the data, (4) data tables, (5) representation and classification of missing data, and (6) identifier codes. The new metadata schema makes additional assumptions underlying data quality assessments explicit, thereby improving reproducible data quality reporting in compliance with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016). While dataquieR has primarily been designed for observational health studies, such as population-based cohort studies (Peters et al., 2022; Schmidt et al., 2023), it can also be applied to all sorts of tabular data from other sources, for instance, electronic health record (EHR) data, or registries.

Conducting large-scale epidemiologic studies requires powerful software for electronic data capture, data management, data quality assessments, and participant management. There is also an increasing need to make studies and the data collected findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). However, reusable software tools from major studies, underlying such needs, are not necessarily known to other researchers. Therefore, this work gives an overview on the main tools used to conduct the internationally highly networked population-based project Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP), as well as approaches taken to improve its FAIRness. Deep phenotyping, formalizing processes from data capture to data transfer, with a strong emphasis on cooperation and data exchange have laid the foundation for a broad scientific impact with more than 1500 published papers to date.