R as a whole could benefit from systematic attention.
There may be scope for several special issues of JSS.

- R overview and philosophy

- R penetration and influence, in the statistics community,
   in machine learning, and in a variety of application areas.

- R as a vehicle for fostering communication between
    researchers in diverse areas.
    [A great thing about R-help, though nowadays this role
     is passing across to other lists such as R-sig-ME, is that
     it facilitates and even forces communication between
     application area specialists, and between those
     specialists and statistics professionals.  This may be
     temporary; we may see the R community fragment into
     diverse communities that focus on their own specialist
     interests? Scope for a sociological study, perhaps?)

- "Who is using R?", as reflected in published scientific literature.
     (I'd like to see a wiki or somesuch where authors
     are encouraged to give details of published analyses
     that have used R.)

- Where is R headed?  How will the shaping of its direction
     proceed?  Will it be a matter of step by step change and
     improvement, or is it (will it be) possible to lay out in
     advance an outline of the directions that its future
     development can be expected to take.

- Traps for new (and old) users.

- Books and papers on R.

- Then onto packages!  I guess what may be in order is
     something like the expansion of a task view into an
     extended paper.


John Maindonald             email: john.maindonald@anu.edu.au
phone : +61 2 (6125)3473    fax  : +61 2(6125)5549
Centre for Mathematics & Its Applications, Room 1194,
John Dedman Mathematical Sciences Building (Building 27)
Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200.


On 23 Nov 2007, at 10:00 PM, r-help-request@r-project.org wrote:

> From: Antony Unwin <unwin@math.uni-augsburg.de>
> Date: 23 November 2007 7:50:52 PM
> To: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] Packages - a great resource, but hard to find the  
> right one
>
>
> Johannes Hüsing wrote
>
>>> Above all there are lots of packages.  As the software editor of the
>>> Journal of Statistical Software I suggested we should review R
>>> packages.
>>
>> You mean: prior to submission?
>
> No.
>
>>> No one has shown any enthusiasm for this suggestion, but I
>>> think it would help.  Any volunteers?
>>
>> Thing is, I may like to volunteer, but not in the "here's a
>> package for you to review by week 32" way. Rather in the way that
>> I search a package which fits my problem.
>
> That's what I was hoping for.
>
>> One package lets me down
>> and I'd like to know other users and the maintainer about it.
>> The other one works black magic and I'd like to drop a raving
>> review about it. This needs an infrastructure with a low barrier
>> to entry. A wiki is not the worst idea if the initial infrastructure
>> is geared at addressing problems rather than packages.
>
> We should differentiate between rave reviews of features that just
> happened to be very useful to someone and reviews of a package as a
> whole.  Both have their place and at the moment we don't have either.
>
> If you are willing to review an R package or aspects of R for JSS
> please let me know.
>
> Antony Unwin
> Professor of Computer-Oriented Statistics and Data Analysis,
> Mathematics Institute,
> University of Augsburg,
> Germany


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