The R Journal is the peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal, published by The R Foundation. It features short to medium length articles (up to 20 pages) covering topics of interest to users and developers of R. For example, description and implementation details of R packages, surveys or reviews of R software related to a particular area, applications of R software or descriptions of teaching resources related to R.
The R Journal reaches a wide audience and has a thorough review process. It has a generally increasing SJR impact factor. Papers are expected to be concise, clearly written, not too technical, clearly related to R, and follow reproducible practices. Additional technical details and examples could be included as supplementary material. Authors of refereed articles should take care to:
- put their contribution in context, in particular discuss related R functions or packages;
- explain the motivation for their contribution;
- provide code to reproduce the material in the paper.
Article types
The R Journal accepts a variety of article topics including:
Packages: Details of contributed R packages that are available on CRAN or Bioconductor, that go beyond a package vignette. This includes providing the broader context, implementation details, applications or examples of use, with the purpose being to make the work relevant to a wider readership than only the package users. The paper might explain the novelty in implementation and use of R, introduce new data structures or general architectures that could be re-usable for other R projects. Some good advice on code style can be found in
- “R packages” chapter 7 by Hadley Wickham at https://r-pkgs.org/r.html,
- “rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review” at https://devguide.ropensci.org/building.html,
- “What I look for in ‘Software Papers’” by Carl Boettiger at https://www.carlboettiger.info/2013/06/13/what-I-look-for-in-software-papers.html
- Using the “styler” package,
- and avoiding the features warned against by Jenny Bryan at https://www.tidyverse.org/articles/2017/12/workflow-vs-script/
Reviews and proposals: surveying and discussing challenges and opportunities of potential importance for the broader R community, including proposals and proof-of-concept implementations.
Comparisons and benchmarking: of implementations in base-R and contributed packages with each other, and where relevant with implementations in other software systems.
Applications: demonstrating how new or existing techniques can be applied in an area of current interest using R, providing a fresh view of such analyses in R that is of benefit beyond the specific application.
Special issue articles: papers associated with a conference like R Medicine, or possibly a collection of papers on a particular topic of interest.
History
The R Journal was established in 2009, superseding the R News. For historical purposes it also a news section, that includes items from R Core, updates from CRAN and Bioconductor, foRwards activities and conference reports.
R Journal article summaries, for the last four years
The R Journal receives a large number of submissions, currently over 200 a year, and processing times and especially review times are highly variable. The summaries below shows that for published articles, the time from first submission to accept averages at under a year. Just a very small number of 2021 submissions await a final decision, and even for 2022 submissions, the majority of articles have received an accept/reject decision.
For published articles in the years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, the boxplots show time from submission to accept by year of publication. Median number of days to accept is under a year. The barchart on the right refers to articles submitted in the years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and reports the status as rejected, in progress or accepted/published. Papers labelled ‘in progress’ are under review or awaiting revisions.
Editorial board
Editor-in-Chief
Simon Urbanek, The University of Auckland, New Zealand r-journal@r-project.org
Executive editors
- Rob Hyndman, Monash University, Australia
- Mark van der Loo, Statistics Netherlands and University of Leiden, The Netherlands
- Catherine Hurley, Maynooth University, Ireland
Associate editors
- Rafael de Andrade Moral, Maynooth University, Ireland
- Vincent Arel-Bundock, University of Montreal, Canada
- Louis Aslett, Durham University, UK
- Rasmus Bååth, Lund University, Sweden
- Przemek Biecek, University of Warsaw, Poland
- Chris Brunsdon, Maynooth University, Ireland
- Kevin Burke, University of Limerick, Ireland
- Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Duke University, USA
- Xiaoyue Cheng, University of Nebraska, Omaha, USA
- Katarina Domijan, Maynooth University, Ireland
- Isabella Gollini, University College Dublin, Ireland
- Michael Kane, Yale University, USA
- Adam Loy, Carleton College, USA
- Elizabeth Sweeney, University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Priyanga Dilini Talagala, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
- Emi Tanaka, Monash University, Australia
- Nicholas Tierney, Telethon Kids, Australia
- Susan Vanderplas, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
- Emily Zabor, The Cleveland Clinic and Tassig Cancer Institute, USA
Editorial advisory board
- Henrik Bengtssen, University of California, San Francisco
- Gabriela de Quiroz, Chief Data Scientist, IBM
- Michael Kane, Yale University, USA
- Rebecca Killick, Lancaster University
Governance
The R Journal is run under the auspices of the R Foundation, and editors of the Journal are appointed by the Foundation board.