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Comparison · Infra & APIs
ShortForm vs surveytidy
A side-by-side editorial comparison of ShortForm and surveytidy — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
ShortForm vs surveytidy: at a glance
What is ShortForm?
Automated scale shortening with lavaan, spending its releases repairing its own search algorithms.
ShortForm automates the creation of short-form psychometric scales by searching for well-fitting subsets of items, using ant colony optimization, simulated annealing and Tabu search over lavaan models. The recent releases are corrective: 0.5.7 fixed the ant colony algorithm failing to update its best model and the simulated annealing routine mis-specifying models containing factor relationships or outcome variables, and 0.5.8 fixed Tabu search under parallel workflows and with multidimensional models. Each release note carries an explicit roadmap listing refactoring for 0.6.0 and input standardisation for 0.7.0, neither of which has shipped.
What is surveytidy?
surveytidy taught every dplyr verb to operate on a whole collection of surveys at once.
surveytidy is the tidyverse-facing half of a two-package survey stack, wrapping survey design objects from surveycore so filter, mutate, select and the rest work on them while carrying variable labels, value labels and a transformation log alongside the data. The May release extended that verb surface to survey_collection, the abstraction surveycore uses to hold several surveys as one object, so a pipeline written once dispatches across every member.
ShortForm vs surveytidy: editorial side-by-side
ShortForm
0.0INFRA · APIS
Automated scale shortening with lavaan, spending its releases repairing its own search algorithms.
◆ Current state
ShortForm automates the creation of short-form psychometric scales by searching for well-fitting subsets of items, using ant colony optimization, simulated annealing and Tabu search over lavaan models. The recent releases are corrective: 0.5.7 fixed the ant colony algorithm failing to update its best model and the simulated annealing routine mis-specifying models containing factor relationships or outcome variables, and 0.5.8 fixed Tabu search under parallel workflows and with multidimensional models. Each release note carries an explicit roadmap listing refactoring for 0.6.0 and input standardisation for 0.7.0, neither of which has shipped.
◆ Where it's heading
The defects being fixed are in the search itself rather than around it. An optimizer that does not correctly retain its best candidate, and a search that mis-specifies models after the first iteration, both produce plausible-looking short forms that are not the ones the method should have found, which is a harder class of problem to notice than a crash. Alongside that the package is shedding dependencies, with ggplot2, ggrepel and tidyr dropped from the plotting methods in 0.5.8. The stated intent to refactor the major functions and standardise their arguments suggests the maintainer regards the current interface as the obstacle to further work.
◆ Prediction
The roadmap repeated across these notes points to a 0.6.0 focused on refactoring the major functions, with argument and output standardisation deferred to 0.7.0. On the evidence of this window, more unit tests and further algorithm-level fixes are likelier to arrive first than either milestone.
surveytidy
0.0INFRA · APIS
surveytidy taught every dplyr verb to operate on a whole collection of surveys at once.
◆ Current state
surveytidy is the tidyverse-facing half of a two-package survey stack, wrapping survey design objects from surveycore so filter, mutate, select and the rest work on them while carrying variable labels, value labels and a transformation log alongside the data. The May release extended that verb surface to survey_collection, the abstraction surveycore uses to hold several surveys as one object, so a pipeline written once dispatches across every member.
◆ Where it's heading
The package is being built in two layers that arrive in order: vector-level transformations first, structural dispatch second. The make_* family in 0.4.0 handles the recoding that survey work actually consists of — labelled to factor, multi-level to dichotomous, scale reversal, valence flipping — with value labels propagating automatically. Collection support then applies data-masking, tidyselect, grouping, slicing and collapsing verbs per survey, with joins explicitly refused and a typed message reporting which surveys were skipped. Metadata fidelity is the recurring bug source: labels surviving across(), stale labels left behind by recoding, the transformation log keeping up with what the verbs did.
◆ Prediction
Joins are the one verb family that errors on collections, with users directed to join before constructing the collection, so that restriction is the clearest outstanding gap. The re-export of surveycore's collection constructors suggests the package is positioning itself as the single import users need, which points toward more re-exports as surveycore's stable API settles.
Alternatives to ShortForm and surveytidy
Other Infra & APIs products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either ShortForm or surveytidy.
massProps
A mass-properties rollup spends a year on documentation and follows its sibling's API
writeAlizer
Six months of releases and not one of them touched the scoring models
samplr
A cognitive-science sampling package ships once, then goes quiet for eighteen months
stochvol
A Bayesian volatility sampler in its maintenance decade, paying for its own speed
midr
A black-box interpreter reaches CRAN, then learns multi-class and survival responses
See all ShortForm alternatives → · See all surveytidy alternatives →
Recent activity from ShortForm and surveytidy
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 2mo agosurveytidymutate() syncs metadata for across() recodes
- 3mo agoShortFormTabu search fixed for parallel and multidimensional models
- 3mo agoShortFormAnt colony search failed to retain its best model
- 3mo agosurveytidydplyr and tidyr verbs dispatch across survey collections
- 5mo agosurveytidyFive label-aware recoding functions for use inside mutate()
- 1y agoShortFormlavaan model specification defaults made forgiving
- 2y agoShortFormCompatibility fixes for a new lavaan release
- 2y agoShortFormAdapted to changed lavaan error and warning messages
- 2y agoShortFormDefault specification tweaks and documentation fixes
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between ShortForm and surveytidy?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. ShortForm and surveytidy are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is ShortForm better than surveytidy?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. ShortForm and surveytidy are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Infra & APIs products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to ShortForm?
Top ShortForm alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "ShortForm alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/shortform for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to surveytidy?
Top surveytidy alternatives in Infra & APIs are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "surveytidy alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/surveytidy for the full list with editorial commentary on each.