Reference Data and Helpers for Small Island States and Territories • islandcodes

islandcodes is a small R package that ships a curated reference list of countries and territories with classifications for Small Island Developing States (SIDS), sub-national island jurisdictions (SNIJ), World Bank region and income group, and political association. It is designed to extend countrycode for researchers working on small islands, sub-sovereign territories, and the Caribbean.

The bundled dataset includes Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba, Sint Maarten, the French overseas collectivities, Åland Islands, and other sub-sovereign cases that ISO 3166-1 country-code lists typically collapse or omit.

Installation

From CRAN once available:

install.packages("islandcodes")

Development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("University-of-Aruba/islandcodes")

Quick start

library(islandcodes)

is_sids(c("Aruba", "Curacao", "Bonaire", "Brazil"))
#> [1]  TRUE FALSE FALSE FALSE

is_snij(c("Aruba", "Curacao", "Bonaire", "Brazil"))
#> [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE

# Add classification columns to your own data frame
df <- data.frame(
  country = c("Aruba", "Curacao", "Bonaire", "Brazil"),
  gdp     = c(3.5, 3.1, 0.5, 1900)
)
add_island_cols(df, "country")

# Filtered subsets
small_islands(sids_only = TRUE)
small_islands(criteria = c(small = TRUE, island = TRUE, sovereign = FALSE))

Why a separate package

countrycode is excellent for the standard ISO 3166-1 country-code conversion problem. It is less reliable for small-island and sub-sovereign work for two reasons:

Sub-sovereign territories. Aruba (AW), Curaçao (CW), and Sint Maarten (SX) have their own ISO codes, but Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba share BQ in ISO 3166-1. islandcodes ships the disambiguating codes BQ-BO, BQ-SE, BQ-SA and joins them on consistently.
SIDS / SNIJ classification. UN-DESA’s SIDS list (sovereign and associate members) and the academic SNIJ classification are not in countrycode. Joining either onto a research dataset usually means hand-copying lists from PDFs.

islandcodes does one thing: it bundles the classification list, exposes a few predicates and a tidy joiner, and stays out of the way otherwise. It imports countrycode so country names are coerced to ISO codes before lookup.

Data source

The bundled islands dataset is mirrored from the University of Aruba island-research-reference-data repository, maintained by the DCDC Network (Digital Competence Dutch Caribbean), licensed CC BY 4.0. The build script at data-raw/DATASET.R pulls the canonical CSV; rebuild after any upstream change.

Citation

Please cite both the package and the underlying reference dataset in academic work. Run citation("islandcodes") for the canonical references.

Acknowledgments

With thanks to Edward Cheung, the Aruban engineer at NASA Goddard who designed A.R.U.B.A. — the ASCS/NCS Relay Unit Breaker Assembly — installed on the Hubble Space Telescope during the 2002 servicing mission. Cheung engineered the backronym so children in his home country would have something concrete to point to on the telescope. The aruba() function in this package is a small homage in the same style: A.R.U.B.A. — Annotated Reference for Under-coded Border Areas. His version cuts power to Hubble’s instruments when there is a fault; ours returns a row of classification data. Both spell Aruba.

The islands reference dataset is the work of the Digital Competence Dutch Caribbean (DCDC) Network at the University of Aruba.

License

CC BY 4.0. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.