Downloading CLS Documentation

This repository contains code to download documentation (PDFs) from CLS's four established cohort studies - NCDS, BCS70, Next Steps, and MCS.

The code places the PDFs into sub-folders for each study-sweep. Where a document pertains to multiple sweeps, the PDF is placed in a separate xwave folder. Where a document pertains to more than one cohort (e.g., the Missing Data Handling Guide) the PDF is placed in a separate All sub-folder.

The code also renames the PDFs to the more user-friendly titles given on the CLS website. Combined the files require ~ 750mb of storage.

To use the code you will need R (https://cran.r-project.org/) and RStudio (https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/) installed. You will only need to use R and RStudio once.

Instructions

1. Download or clone this GitHub directory.

   • To download the directory, click Code -> Download ZIP above (see screenshot below) then unzip the downloaded file and place in a suitable location on your computer.

   • To clone the directory, open your computer’s command line or terminal, navigate to an appropriate location (cd ...) and type git clone https://github.com/CLS-Data/cohort-documentation. You may want to rename the folder from cohort-documentation to "CLS Documentation" or something similar.

2. In the downloaded folder, double click the CLS Documentation.Rproj file. This will open RStudio and automatically sets the working directory to the folder that contains the .Rproj file, so you won't need to change any file paths.

3. Run the code in 01_get_pdfs.R. You will need the tidyverse package installed. If you do not have this installed, uncomment the first line and run it.

After the code is finished, you will have a new set of sub-folders within the cohort-documentation folder that contain the PDFs.

This code was tested on 27 November 2024. If you have any issues using this code, please contact me at liam.wright@ucl.ac.uk.