[R] status of CRAN

[Jonathan Baron]

On 10/08/02 16:18, Robin Hankin wrote:
Dear List

>Under my list of publications, I included a document which I wrote
(R-and-octave.txt) that ended up in the "contributed docs" section of
CRAN.

>Unfortunately, neither my HoD nor the personnel person were terribly
impressed with it ...

>They cited lack of peer-review, and fact that it was disseminated
solely over the 'net as reasons.

>How would members of the List respond to this criticism?

It seems to me that the 'net is a non-issue and could be refuted by
pointing to the existence of refereed journal published solely or
mainly on the internet.  (I started to search for them, and I found
many, but no complete list.)

The point about peer-review is more serious.  Papers given at
meetings, and even those posted on papers.ssrn.com, are often of low
quality; their selection is based on the topic more than the content.
But some scholarship _is_ important even though it is not refereed.

I think a good way to handle this is with letters of recommendation
written by people known to your evaluators.  This is an imposition, of
course, but such letters need not be long.

I don't think hit counts are very useful.  They are based more on the
topic, or the author's reputation, than the content.  (SSRN, however,
makes a big deal out of download counts, even though these are based
on reading the abstract only.)

-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page:            http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron

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