README.md

In dsself/standardizecountries: Standardize Country Names and Provide Common Abbreviations and Codes

standardizecountries

Social scientists that work with cross sections of countries typically work with many different datasets and each dataset seems to vary names of countries. The list of possible country names was drawn from a Stata .do file complied by Rich Nielsen around 2008 and I have since updated the list with variations of country names that I have found.

This package will allow users to standardize country names and then correlate direclty to Correlates of War IDs and other commonly used codes and abbreviations.

Users may wonder why I created this package in addition to the countrycode package already on CRAN. The main reason I built this is because countrycode is limited, I believe, in the variation of country names that it captures which leads to the user having to either manually rename countries to fit the package or having to assign country codes. The critical difference between standard and countrycode is that I employ a corpus of variations in country names that political scientists have found in their research whereas countrycode uses regex to match on country variations.

To standarize country names use country_name(x), or country_panel(x, y) if using panel data, and then create or overwrite a vector for a new ID or abbreviation using country_code(x, y, z) where x is the source variable standardized by country_name or country_panel, y is the type of source variable (e.g. Correlates of War numeric), and z is the desired output (e.g. United Nations numeric codes).

If you are using panel (longitudinal, time-series cross-sectional) data and want to account for splits or mergers of countries (e.g. Czechoslovakia or Vietnam) use country_panel(x,y) where x is the country name to be standardized and y is the year variable.

Because this works with a list of known variations instead of regex (what countrycode package uses) please help me identify potential variants of country names or country mergers/splits so I can add them.

To install

devtools::install_github("dsself/standardizecountries")
library(standard)

dsself/standardizecountries documentation built on March 14, 2023, 12:22 a.m.