[Rd] CRAN Server download statistics (Was: R Usage Statistics)

[Jeff Ryan]

While I think download statistics are potentially interesting for
developers, done incorrectly it can very likely damage the community.
A basic data reporting problem, with all of the caveats attached.

This information has also been readily available from the main CRAN
mirror for years:

http://www.r-project.org/awstats/awstats.cran.r-project.org.html
http://cran.r-project.org/report_cran.html

Best,
Jeff

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 6:18 PM, Fellows, Ian <ifellows at ucsd.edu> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> It seems that the question of how may people use (or download) R, and it's packages is one that comes up on a fairly regular basis in a variety of forums (There was also recent thread on the subject on Stack Overflow). A couple of students at UCLA (including myself), wanted to address the issue, so we set up a system to get and parse the cran.stat.ucla.edu APACHE logs every night, and display some basic statistics. Right now, we have a working sketch of a site based on one week of observations.
>
> http://neolab.stat.ucla.edu/cranstats/
>
> We would very much like to incorporate data from all CRAN mirrors, including cran.r-project.org. We would also like to set this up in a way that is minimally invasive for the site administrators. Internally, our administrator has set up a protected directory with the last couple days of cran activity. We then pull that down using curl.
>
> What would be the best and easiest way for the CRAN mirrors to share their data? Is the contact information for the administrators available anywhere?
>
>
> Thank you,
> Ian Fellows
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org [r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Steven McKinney [smckinney at bccrc.ca]
> Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2009 2:21 PM
> To: Kevin R. Coombes; r-devel at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Rd] R Usage Statistics
>
> Hi Kevin,
>
> What a surprising comment from a reviewer for BMC Bioinformatics.
>
> I just did a PubMed search for "limma" and "aroma.affymetrix",
> just two methods for which I use R software regularly.
> "limma" yields 28 hits, several of which are published
> in BMC Bioinformatics.  Bengtsson's aroma.affymetrix paper
> "Estimation and assessment of raw copy numbers at the single locus level."
> is already cited by 6 others.
>
> It almost seems too easy to work up lists of usage of R packages.
>
> Spotfire is an application built around S-Plus that has widespread use
> in the biopharmaceutical industry at a minimum.  Vivek Ranadive's
> TIBCO company just purchased Insightful, the S-Plus company.
> (They bought Spotfire previously.)
> Mr. Ranadive does not spend money on environments that are
> not appropriate for deploying applications.
>
> You could easily cull a list of corporation names from the
> various R email listservs as well.
>
> Press back with the reviewer.  Reviewers can learn new things
> and will respond to arguments with good evidence behind them.
> Good luck!
>
>
> Steven McKinney
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org [r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Kevin R. Coombes [krcoombes at mdacc.tmc.edu]
> Sent: November 19, 2009 10:47 AM
> To: r-devel at r-project.org
> Subject: [Rd] R Usage Statistics
>
> Hi,
>
> I got the following comment from the reviewer of a paper (describing an
> algorithm implemented in R) that I submitted to BMC Bioinformatics:
>
> "Finally, which useful for exploratory work and some prototyping,
> neither R nor S-Plus are appropriate environments for deploying user
> applications that would receive much use."
>
> I can certainly respond by pointing out that CRAN contains more than
> 2000 packages and Bioconductor contains more than 350. However, does
> anyone have statistics on how often R (and possibly some R packages) are
> downloaded, or on how many people actually use R?
>
> Thanks,
>    Kevin
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>



-- 
Jeffrey Ryan
jeffrey.ryan at insightalgo.com

ia: insight algorithmics
www.insightalgo.com