Variety and Mainstays of the R Developer Community

The thriving developer community has a significant impact on the widespread use of R software. To better understand this community, we conducted a study analyzing all R packages available on CRAN. We identified the most popular topics of R packages by text mining the package descriptions. Additionally, using network centrality measures, we discovered the important packages in the package dependency network and influential developers in the global R community. Our analysis showed that among the 20 topics identified in the topic model, Data Import, Export, and Wrangling, as well as Data Visualization, Result Presentation, and Interactive Web Applications, were particularly popular among influential packages and developers. These findings provide valuable insights into the R community.

Lijin Zhang (Graduate School of Education, Stanford University) , Xueyang Li (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame) , Zhiyong Zhang (Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame)
2023-12-18

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Supplementary materials are available in addition to this article. It can be downloaded at RJ-2023-060.zip

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For attribution, please cite this work as

Zhang, et al., "Variety and Mainstays of the R Developer Community", The R Journal, 2023

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2023-060,
  author = {Zhang, Lijin and Li, Xueyang and Zhang, Zhiyong},
  title = {Variety and Mainstays of the R Developer Community},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2023},
  note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2023-060},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2023-060},
  volume = {15},
  issue = {3},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {5-25}
}

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