[R] Citing R/Packages Question

[roger koenker]

I've had an email exchange with the authors of a recent paper
in Nature who also made a good faith effort to cite both R and the  
quantreg
package, and were told that the Nature "house style" didn't allow such
citations so they were dropped from the published paper and the
"supplementary material" appearing on the Nature website.

Since the CRAN website makes a special effort to make prior versions  
of packages
available, it would seem to me to be much more useful to cite version
numbers than access dates.  There  are serious questions about the
ephemerality of url citations, not all of which are adequately resolved
by the Wayback machine, and access dating, but it would be nice to
have some better standards for such contingent citations rather than
leave authors at the mercy of copy editors.  I would also be  
interested in
suggestions by other contributors.


url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger                Roger Koenker
email   rkoenker at uiuc.edu                       Department of Economics
vox:    217-333-4558                            University of Illinois
fax:    217-244-6678                            Champaign, IL 61820


On May 8, 2009, at 5:27 PM, Derek Ogle wrote:

> I used R and the quantreg package in a manuscript that is currently in
> the proofs stage.  I cited both R and quantreg as suggested by
> citation() and noted the version of R and quantreg that I used in the
> main text as
>
>
>
>  "All tests were computed with the R v2.9.0 statistical programming
> language (R Development Core 2008).  Quantile regressions were  
> conducted
> with the quantreg v4.27 package (Koenker 2008) for R."
>
>
>
> The editor has asked me to also "provide the date when the webpage was
> accessed" for both R and quantreg.
>
>
>
> This does not seem like an appropriate request to me as both R and the
> quantreg package are versioned.  This request seems to me to be the  
> same
> as asking someone when they purchased commercial package X version Y
> (which I don't think would be asked).
>
>
>
> Am I thinking about this correctly or has the editor made a valid
> request?
>
>
>
> I would be interested in any comments or opinions.
>
>
>
> Dr. Derek H. Ogle
>
> Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Natural Resources
>
> Northland College
>
> 1411 Ellis Avenue
>
> Box 112
>
> Ashland, WI
>
> 715.682.1300
>
> www.ncfaculty.net/dogle/
>
>
>
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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