R Citation through time

On Tue, 12 Sep 2006 07:53:52 +0200,
Gregor Gorjanc (GG) wrote:

  > Hello!
  > I keep my local bib file and up to now I had entry

  >   @Manual{R:2003,
  >     title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing},
  >     author = {{R Development Core Team}},
  >     organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
  >     address = {Vienna, Austria},
  >     year = {2005},
  >     note = {{ISBN} 3-900051-00-3},
  >     url = {http://www.R-project.org},
  >   }

  > With recent versions ISBN changed to 3-900051-07-0.

It changed with 2.0.0, which is not that recent ...

  > Now I wonder if there is any canonical way to refer to R without
  > the need to change R entry over and over. It would probably be the
  > best just to add new entry for "new version" for R. Now the
  > question is what is new version or when does ISBN number change?

The ISBN changes with every major version of R, i.e., it will change
next when 3.0.0 is released. We are already stretching the ISBN rules
to the limit (on the no-change-side) with that policy, and the
reason is exactly to make the reference more stable. But with a major
release we really need to assign a new ISBN.