surveydown

Software
Survey
An open-source survey platform using , Quarto, Shiny, and PostgreSQL.
Authors

Pingfan Hu

John Helveston

Bogdan Bunea

Published

March 1, 2025

Publication

Journal Paper - surveydown: An open-source, markdown-based platform for programmable and reproducible surveys

PLOS One, August 2025

PLOS One Webpage PDF

Citation

If you use this package in a publication, please cite the PLOS One article associated with it! You can get the citation information by typing citation("surveydown") into R, or copying below.

citation("surveydown")
NoteSuggested citation

Hu P, Bunea B, Helveston J (2025). “surveydown: An open-source, markdown-based platform for programmable and reproducible surveys.” PLOS One, 20(8). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0331002

Overview

surveydown is a flexible, open-source platform for making programmable, markdown-based surveys with , Quarto, Shiny, and PostgreSQL.

The package deployment site can be accessed here.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Design your survey as a Quarto document using markdown and R code.
  2. Render your survey into a Shiny app that can be hosted online and sent to respondents.
  3. Store survey response data in a PostgreSQL database. We recommend Supabase as a free, secure, and easy to use option.

The surveydown package provides functions to bring this all together.

See Documentation to get started making your own surveydown survey!

See Templates for a variety of templates!

Motivation

Most survey platforms use graphic interfaces or spreadsheets to define survey content, making version control, collaboration, and reproducibility difficult or impossible. Surveydown was designed to address these problems. As an open-source, markdown-based platform, all survey content is defined using plain text (markdown and R code) in two files:

  • survey.qmd: A Quarto document that contains the survey content (pages, questions, etc).
  • app.R: An R script defining a shiny app that contains global settings (libraries, database configuration, etc.) and server configuration options (e.g., conditional page skipping / conditional display, etc.).

This approach makes it easy to reproduce, share, and version control your surveys with common tools like Git. And since all survey data is stored in a PostgreSQL database, you have total control over where your survey data lives. We recommend Supabase as a free, secure, and easy to use option.

Usage

To start using surveydown, you need both and Quarto installed on your computer. We also recommend working with an IDE that has good support for , Quarto, and Shiny. RStudio is great, and we also like Positron and VSCode.

You can install surveydown from CRAN in your console:

install.packages("surveydown")

Or you can install the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak('surveydown-dev/surveydown')

Load the package with:

library(surveydown)

License

See the License page on the source code repository.