[R] popular R packages

[David Winsemius]

When the question arises "How many R-users there are?", the consensus  
seems to be that there is no valid method to address the question. The  
thread "R-business case" from 2004 can be found here:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2004-March/047606.html

I did not see any material revision to that conclusion during the  
recent discussion of the New York Times article on the r-challenge to  
SAS.

Gmane tracks the number of r-help activity (I realize not what you  
asked for):
http://www.gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.r.general

The distribution of r-packages is, well  ... distributed:
http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html

At least one of the participants in the 2004 thread suggested that it  
would be a "good thing" to track the numbers of downloads by package.  
I have not heard of any such system being installed in the mirror  
software and I see nothing that suggests data gathering in the CRAN  
Mirror How-to:
http://cran.r-project.org/mirror-howto.html

On the other hand I am not part of R-core, so you must await more  
authoritative opinion since a 5 year-old thread and amateur  
speculation is not much of a leg to stand on.

There are lexicographic packages for R. One approach to a de novo  
analysis would be to do some sort of natural language analysis of the  
r-help archives counting up either package names with non-English  
names or  close proximity of the words "library" or "package" to  
package names that overlap the 30,000 common English words. That would  
have the danger of inflating counts of the packages with the least  
adequate documentation or a paucity of good worked examples, but there  
are many readers of this list who suspect that new users don't look at  
the documentation, so who knows?

-- 
David Winsemius


On Mar 7, 2009, at 2:57 PM, Jeroen Ooms wrote:

>
> I would like to get some idea of which R-packages are popular, and  
> what R is
> used for in general. Are there any statistics available on which R  
> packages
> are downloaded often, or is there something like a package-survey?  
> Something
> similar to http://popcon.debian.org/ maybe? Any tips are welcome!
>
> -----
> Jeroen Ooms * Dept. of Methodology and Statistics * Utrecht University
>
> Visit  http://www.jeroenooms.com www.jeroenooms.com  to explore some  
> of my
> current projects.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
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David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT