[R] Making a case for using R in Academia

[Douglas Bates]

On 11/9/06, Charilaos Skiadas <skiadas at hanover.edu> wrote:
> As a addendum to all this, this is one of the responses I got from
> one of my colleagues:
>
> "The problem with R is that our students in many social science
> fields, are expected to know SPSS when they go to graduate school.
> Not having a background in SPSS would put these students at a
> disadvantage."

One measure of the acceptance of R in various disciplines is the
number of statistics texts that include "R" in the title.  There was a
recent post to this list from a representative of Chapman and Hall
describing the texts based on R that they are currently offering.
Springer has a special series of books on R and Wiley also offers
several.  At a recent statistics conference I was struck by the number
of books featuring R that were prominently displayed on publishers'
tables.  If I recall correctly, all the publishers were featuring
books based on R.

As Spencer Graves mentions in another reply on this thread, interest
in R is accelerating in many disciplines.  An article in the latest
issue of R News describes how R is now the standard software system
for analysis of climate prediction data because it allows for
reproducible research.

Another way of measuring the trend in interest in R is to look at the
publication dates of the texts that have "R" in the title.  Most of
them are very recent and their numbers are swelling compared to the
number of texts that have "SPSS" in the title.

I primarily teach engineering statistics where Minitab was used
extensively but I see interest in Minitab waning, even in the
engineering.

I should mention that as a member of the R Development Core Team I
cannot be considered a disinterested observer.

P.S. I like Spencer's comment that "You should be preparing your
students for the future, not the past."  That seems "fortunes-worthy"
to me.