Overview

The R Journal is a 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:

Article types

The R Journal accepts a variety of article topics including:

History

The R Journal was established in 2009, superseding the R News. For historical purposes it also includes 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 around 150 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.

For published articles in the years 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 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 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and reports the status as rejected, in progress or accepted/published. Papers labelled ‘in progress’ are under review or awaiting revisions.

Reviewers

We are keen to welcome new reviewers for the R Journal. If you would like to volunteer to review articles, please complete this form here. You should be an experienced R user, preferably a package developer, with prior experience in publishing scholarly work.