NEWS

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contentiousR 0.1.0 (2026-10-15)

Changes made for CRAN

• The package title is now "Contentious Politics and Civil Conflict Research".
• cn_cite() now returns its result visibly instead of printing it with cat(). The result is a bibentry object with the additional class cn_citation; typing cn_cite("archigos") at the console still shows the BibTeX, and print() shows it explicitly.
• The bundled data files are smaller (tarball 4.3 MB): they keep only the columns the package reads, and the MEC and NMC Stata files are stored as compressed .rds. Loader output is unchanged. 'haven' is no longer used.
• citation("contentiousR") now lists the SSRN preprint describing the package, followed by the software citation.

Bug fixes

• load_vdem_data(coding_system = "cow") no longer silently drops East Germany (COW 265, 1949-1990); it was previously excluded only in the "cow" branch, so V-Dem coverage for Germany differed depending on the chosen coding system with no indication why.
• add_spell_duration() now computes spells from the actual calendar-year difference instead of row position within a state. A gap in the input years (e.g. left by tidyr::drop_na(event), which the package's own examples recommend) previously understated the elapsed time.
• plot_coverage() now errors with a clear message instead of crashing when drop_empty = TRUE removes every state (e.g. the chosen event never occurs in the supplied panel/year range).
• cn_cite() matched keywords by substring, so a short dataset name (e.g. "mm") could also match an unrelated entry whose keyword merely contained it as a substring ("mmad"). Keyword matching is now exact against the comma-separated keyword list.
• harmonize_conflict_data(): a factor year_col was coerced with as.integer(), which returns the factor's internal level codes rather than the printed year. It is now converted to character first. A date_col that fails to parse (e.g. a non-ISO format without a matching date_format) now raises a clear error instead of a generic base-R one.

Bring your own data

• Added harmonize_conflict_data() to join externally supplied conflict/ event data (GDELT, ICEWS, ACLED, or anything else not bundled with contentiousR) onto a state panel: it maps the caller's country column to COW/GW codes via countrycode::countrycode(), extracts a year from either a pre-parsed year_col or a date_col/date_format, optionally aggregates event-level rows to country-year (<prefix>_onset, <prefix>_n_events), and joins the result in. Unlike add_conflict(), it never downloads or bundles data itself, so contentiousR gains no dependency on gdeltr2, icews, or acled.api.

Visualization

• plot_coverage() gained a show_labels argument (default TRUE). Set it to FALSE to drop the per-row country/code labels, which otherwise overlap and become illegible once the panel covers more than a few dozen states.
• plot_regional_coverage()'s region labels are now horizontal and word-wrapped instead of angled, and its region field's canonical "Middle East" label is the shorter "Middle East & North Africa" form. plot_temporal_coverage()'s period labels are now vertical instead of angled. Both plots no longer set a ggplot2 title (redundant with a caption in a manuscript).
• Added plot_regional_coverage() and plot_temporal_coverage() to compare regional and temporal event coverage across any combination of conflict_data() campaign/episode datasets, plus a "Comparing revolutionary-event datasets" article reproducing the descriptive exercise in Guseinov, Ustyuzhanin & Korotayev (2026).
• Added add_regions() to join one or more countrycode region classifications (region, region23, un.region.name, un.regionsub.name) onto a state panel by cow/gw code.

Data

• Added the Major Episodes of Contention (MEC) dataset: 2,734 globally covered reformist and maximalist episodes from 1955 through 2018. MEC is available through conflict_data(dataset = "mec") and add_conflict(dataset = "mec"). Episode-level rows are preserved unless the existing aggregate = TRUE policy is requested.

Correctness

• fetch_campaign_events() (used by plot_regional_coverage() and plot_temporal_coverage()) now compares NAVCO 2.1 at the same campaign-onset level as the other datasets, using conflict_data()'s own nvc2.1_ONSET flag (keyed on the numeric campaign id) instead of re-deriving onsets from the campaign name, which is not unique and could silently merge distinct campaigns that happen to share a name.
• fetch_campaign_events()'s region field now stays at exactly 7 categories. countrycode::countrycode()'s "region" destination labels a few pre-1990 historical entities (Yemen Arab Republic, Yemen People's Republic, the United Arab Republic) with the World Bank's older "Middle East & North Africa" string while every other MENA country gets the newer "Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan & Pakistan" string; since campaign data covering the 1950s-80s includes those historical codes, the region was silently splitting into two bars in plot_regional_coverage()/plot_temporal_coverage().
• gdp_growth (load_gdp_data(), dataset = "gapminder") is now NA unless the preceding row is genuinely one year earlier for the same country, the same gap-safety check add_lag() uses.
• Removed add_pop(). It was an exact duplicate of add_population() (same body, same arguments, two visually identical Reference entries) and every other add_*()/load_*_data() pair in the package already shares one name (add_vdem()/load_vdem_data(), add_leader_data()/load_leader_data(), etc.) -- add_population() is the one that matches load_population_data(). Use add_population() instead.
• Renamed add_spells() to add_spell_duration() to stop it silently shadowing (or being shadowed by) peacesciencer::add_spells() when both packages are attached in the same session -- the two are similar in spirit but not interchangeable (contentiousR's version works on any binary _onset/_incidence/_ongoing column, not a fixed set of bundled columns).
• conflict_data() now applies start_year and end_year consistently to every bundled source.
• UCDP/PRIO output now distinguishes conflict incidence from episode onset. ucdp_prio_onset is based on start_date2; the new ucdp_prio_incidence column identifies all active conflict-years.
• SCAD country-year totals now exclude UCDP placeholder records, deduplicate multi-location rows by event ID, and treat documented negative death-count codes as missing.
• All-missing groups now produce NA instead of -Inf, NaN, and associated warnings during conflict aggregation.
• Mass Mobilization participant strings are retained in mm_participants_reported; mm_participants summarizes only exact numeric reports.
• add_conflict() no longer re-aggregates sources that are already unique by country-year, preventing character-valued source fields from being dropped.

API and robustness

• Added as_peacesciencer_panel() to supply the state-year key aliases and metadata required by peacesciencer while preserving contentiousR's API.
• Added add_from_peacesciencer() to apply a state-year peacesciencer function while keeping temporary ccode/gwcode keys out of the result.
• build_states_cow_panel() is internal again (not exported). It's the actual COW-panel implementation build_states_panel(coding_system = "cow") dispatches to, but there's no public reason to call it directly instead of build_states_panel() -- and its GW counterpart, build_states_gw_panel(), was never exported in the first place.
• Added strict validation for years, logical flags, panel keys, and output-key uniqueness.
• build_states_panel() now validates start_year/end_year against the Correlates of War / Gleditsch-Ward state system's actual coverage: 1816-2025.
• Added ucdp_vpp_incidence. The existing ucdp_vpp_onset column remains as a compatibility alias and is now documented as incidence rather than onset.
• Removed the magrittr dependency in favor of R's native pipe.

Release infrastructure

• Added broader test coverage, two introductory vignettes, package-level documentation, data provenance and licensing notes, pkgdown configuration, and GitHub Actions for package checks and site deployment.
• Added a case study article assembling a panel and modeling revolutionary onset, and a "Comparing revolutionary-event datasets" article (see Visualization above).
• Added a package logo, shown in the README and the pkgdown site navbar.
• Added formal References sections to load_gdp_data()/add_gdp(), load_population_data()/add_population(), load_military_expenditure_data()/add_military_expenditure(), load_vdem_data()/add_vdem(), conflict_data()/add_conflict(), load_leader_data()/add_leader_data(), and plot_regional_coverage()/plot_temporal_coverage(), citing the underlying data source(s) for each.
• Corrected the SCAD citation's DOI (in DESCRIPTION and the bundled bibliography behind cn_cite()): the previous DOI did not resolve.