[R] Citing R in journal articles (or the failure to)

[Heather Turner]

Hi Achim,

Thanks for pointing us to the code from the colorspace package - a good
example of how to keep the citation information up-to-date
automatically, something I had not considered...

Heather

--
Dr H Turner
Senior Research Fellow
Dept. of Statistics
The University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL

Tel: 024 76575870
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Achim Zeileis wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Michael Friendly wrote:
> 
>>> One could complement that by a
>>>   url = {http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tweedie}
>>
>> In two recent in press articles where I cited R packages,
>> I was asked by the copy-editor to add a location or url to the
>> references. Could I suggest that citation() be modified to include
>> the URL automatically?
> 
> That's a good suggestion and one that I discussed several times with
> Kurt. The problem is that citation() only looks at the installed package
> which doesn't know where it came from. Thus, I have AFAIK no simple
> means of checking whether a particular package I'm using was obtained
> from CRAN, Bioc, R-Forge, or some local source package. Hence, the URL
> cannot be included automatically.
> 
> I agree that this would be nice to have. One idea would be that the CRAN
> maintainer adds a line to the DESCRIPTION file upon release to CRAN.
> There are a few ideas how to do this exactly and it's not yet implemented.
> 
> As a package maintainer, however, you can improve the situation for your
> own packages by writing a CITATION file that has the CRAN URL in it. For
> example, the first citEntry() in the "colorspace" package has:
> 
> ## R >= 2.8.0 passes package metadata to citation().
> if(!exists("meta") || is.null(meta)) meta <-
> packageDescription("colorspace")
> year <- sub("-.*", "", meta$Date)
> note <- sprintf("R package version %s", meta$Version)
> 
> citEntry(entry = "Manual",
>          title = "{colorspace}: Color Space Manipulation",
>          author = personList(as.person("Ross Ihaka"),
>                          as.person("Paul Murrell"),
>                              as.person("Kurt Hornik"),
>                  as.person("Achim Zeileis")),
>          year = year,
>          note = note,
>          url = "http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=colorspace",
> 
>          textVersion =
>          paste("Ross Ihaka, Paul Murrell, Kurt Hornik, Achim Zeileis",
>               sprintf("(%s).", year),
>                "colorspace: Color Space Manipulation.",
>            paste(note, ".", sep = ""),
>                "URL http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=colorspace")
> )
> 
> Best wishes,
> Z
> 
>> In the function, this would entail replacing the line
>>
>>  z$url <- meta$URL
>>
>> with something like
>>
>>  z$url <- if (is.null(meta$URL)
>> paste("http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=", package, sep="") else
>> meta$URL
>>
>> I say "something like" because I'm not sure how to handle other
>> repositories.
>>
>> Along similar lines, someone recently posted a script to generate
>> a .bib file for all packages installed.  It would be useful if someone
>> were to implement that script for CRAN and make the resulting
>> R-packages.bib file available on the CRAN site.
>>
>> -Michael
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Michael Friendly     Email: friendly AT yorku DOT ca
>> Professor, Psychology Dept.
>> York University      Voice: 416 736-5115 x66249 Fax: 416 736-5814
>> 4700 Keele Street    http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/friendly.html
>> Toronto, ONT  M3J 1P3 CANADA
>>
>>
>>
> 
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