The ‘Editorial’ article from the 2011-1 issue.
This issue comes approximately one month after CRAN passed a new milestone: the number of packages in the repository had reached 3000. With such a large number of packages (and the number is still rising of course) it becomes increasingly difficult for package authors to get their work known and for R users to find packages that will be useful to them. The R Journal plays an important role in this context; it provides a platform for developers to introduce their packages in a user-friendly form and although the presented packages are not validated, publication in The R Journal gives the quality assurance that comes from thorough peer review.
Given that The R Journal only publishes around 20 contributed articles a year however, there is more that needs to be done to communicate developments on CRAN. The editorial board had some discussion recently over whether to keep the traditional “Changes on CRAN´´ section. Although there are other ways to keep up-to-date with CRAN news, notably CRANberries (http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries/) and crantastic (http://crantastic.org/), some people still appreciate an occasional round-up that they can browse through. So this section stays for now, but we are open to suggested improvements.
Another important way to keep abreast of developments in the R community is via conferences and workshops. As program chair for useR! 2011, I have been pulling together the program for this conference at the same time as preparing this issue. At this year’s useR! there will be around 150 contributed talks and more than 30 contributed posters from across the R community. Looking forward to this conference, we invited Rob Hyndman and Di Cook to share their presentation tips in the Help Desk column of this issue. Of course, useRs present their work at many and varied conferences, and this is reflected in our News section where we have a report of an experimental format used for the Polish R Users’ Conference and a report of workshops run by Project MOSAIC, a statistical education initiative in which R features prominently.
Although Vince Carey officially stepped down from the editorial board at the end of last year, this issue features several articles that he saw through to publication, so we thank him once again for all his work on the Journal. We welcome Hadley Wickham on board, an enthusiastic contributor to the R community, as evidenced not only by his own article in this issue, but by the social network analysis of R mailing lists presented by Angela Bohn and colleagues. These two articles are just the start of a fine collection of contributed articles and we also have a new book review to report.
I hope this issue goes some way to helping useRs navigate their way through the R world!
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For attribution, please cite this work as
Turner, "Editorial", The R Journal, 2011
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2011-1-editorial,
author = {Turner, Heather},
title = {Editorial},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2011},
note = {https://rjournal.github.io/},
volume = {3},
issue = {1},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {3-3}
}