ABCDscores

The ABCD Study follows more than 11,000 young people from ages 9–10 into adulthood, and much of its value lives in summary scores — composite measures for constructs like cognition, mental health, and substance use. Historically those scores came from a patchwork of REDCap fields and one-off scripts: rigid, hard to version, and opaque about how each number was derived.

ABCDscores replaces that patchwork with one open R package. Each score is a self-contained function named after the exact variable it produces, organized by research domain and backed by shared utilities for the fiddly parts — means, sums, missing-value rules. Version 7.0.0 covers 906 scores and was used to generate 3,231 measures in the ABCD 7.0 release, all fast enough to run on a laptop.

Defaults set by the study’s assessment workgroups reproduce released scores exactly, while adjustable arguments leave room for custom research — a template for reproducible scoring in any large cohort study.