[R] popular R packages

[(Ted Harding)]

On 10-Mar-09 01:07:54, David Duffy wrote:
> Given we are talking about statistical software, one bibliometric
> measure of relative package popularity is scientific citations.
> Web of Science is not too useful where the citation has been to a
> website or computer package, but Google Scholar for "lme4: Linear
> mixed-effects models using S4 classes" gives us 108 journal
> citations; "mgcv: GAMs and generalized ridge regression for R" 80 etc
> 
> Cheers, David Duffy.

A good point. But such numbers must be considered in the context
of the prevalence of the kind of study for which the respective
methods would be used.

A great number of epidemiological studies would be suitable for
application of glm(). Fewer would involve GAMs. "Popularity" of
a package by citation frequency would (other things being equal)
be proportional to the frequency of the kind of study for which
it could be used.

So one  should either evaluate the proportion of studies in which
an R package *could* be used, in which it *was* used; or compare
the number of citations of an R package with the number of citations
of an equiavlent package/module/proc in other software.

Ted.

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Date: 10-Mar-09                                       Time: 02:03:22
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