[R] R development master class: NYC, Dec 12-13

[Spencer Graves]

On 11/13/2011 12:58 PM, Sarah Goslee wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Steve Lianoglou
> <mailinglist.honeypot at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>>> Some of the money I earn from these courses goes to pay for my summer
>>> salary and supports student research. It also gives me confidence that
>>> if I don't get tenure because I've been writing R packages instead of
>>> papers, I can keep doing the work I love.
>> If that actually happens, that would be an amazing/colossal (not in a
>> good way) testament to how well the "rating system" works in academia.
> I'm not in academia, but government research. I do go through a review
> very similar to the tenure process. Last time, I was told that I couldn't list
> my R package and associated papers as a research activity with substantial
> impact because it was outside my official scope of work. (Even though I
> wrote it so I could *do* my work.) I have no trouble seeing academic
> administrators do the same thing.


       What can be done to fight that?


       Do you publish papers in refereed academic journals, like in 
academia?


       The ultimate evaluation of the value of publications is the 
number of citations to the work.  You should be able to go to Science 
Citation Index and get reports of the citations to papers you and your 
peers have written.  With R, I know of two ways to access references. 
The simplest is to use the sos package, and then "findFn" for your name.


       Example:


> hw. <- findFn('{hadley wickham}', 999)
found 517 matches;  retrieving 26 pages
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
> summary(hw.)

Call:
findFn(string = "{hadley wickham}", maxPages = 999)

Total number of matches: 517
Downloaded 506 links in 24 packages.

Packages with at least 3 matches using pattern
   '{hadley%20wickham}'
            Package Count MaxScore TotalScore       Date
1          ggplot2   255        1        255 2011-11-04
2           rggobi    88        1         88 2011-04-20
3          reshape    54        1         54 2011-10-07
4  DescribeDisplay    23        3         25 2010-03-24
5            helpr    20        1         20 2010-11-05
6             plyr    20        1         20 2011-11-04
7         tourrGui    10        1         10 2011-02-05
8           lvplot     6        1          6 2010-03-24
9           GGally     4        2          5 2011-11-04
10      Rd2roxygen     4        1          4 2011-09-15
11    latticeExtra     3        2          4 2011-11-04
12           hints     3        1          3 2010-03-24
13           tourr     3        1          3 2011-09-15


       The first few rows are Hadley's packages.  The later ones are 
other packages that cite him.


       Secondly, the information on CRAN for each of Hadley's packages 
lists "reverse dependencies".


       When I look at Science Citation Index for all the papers I've 
published, I've been disappointed.  When I look at what I've done with 
R, it seems that more people have gotten more value from that work than 
from the papers I've written.  One of the reasons is that papers and 
books with companion software is much easier to read and understand, 
because walking through R code line by line with examples can answer 
many questions that are not easily answered from the printed page alone.


       hope this helps.
       spencer
p.s.  It will be a sad commentary on Rice and the academic tenure system 
in the US if Hadley is denied tenure.  He has made a major contribution 
to the R community and through that to all of humanity through all the 
people around the world who use R to help them better understand and 
manage their own social, political, and physical environments.

> Sarah


-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Technology Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567
web:  www.structuremonitoring.com