R Usage Statistics

Hi Kevin,

What a surprising comment from a reviewer for BMC Bioinformatics.

I just did a PubMed search for "limma" and "aroma.affymetrix",
just two methods for which I use R software regularly.
"limma" yields 28 hits, several of which are published
in BMC Bioinformatics.  Bengtsson's aroma.affymetrix paper
"Estimation and assessment of raw copy numbers at the single locus level."
is already cited by 6 others.

It almost seems too easy to work up lists of usage of R packages.

Spotfire is an application built around S-Plus that has widespread use
in the biopharmaceutical industry at a minimum.  Vivek Ranadive's
TIBCO company just purchased Insightful, the S-Plus company.
(They bought Spotfire previously.)
Mr. Ranadive does not spend money on environments that are
not appropriate for deploying applications.

You could easily cull a list of corporation names from the 
various R email listservs as well.

Press back with the reviewer.  Reviewers can learn new things
and will respond to arguments with good evidence behind them.
Good luck!


Steven McKinney

Hi,

I got the following comment from the reviewer of a paper (describing an
algorithm implemented in R) that I submitted to BMC Bioinformatics:

"Finally, which useful for exploratory work and some prototyping,
neither R nor S-Plus are appropriate environments for deploying user
applications that would receive much use."

I can certainly respond by pointing out that CRAN contains more than
2000 packages and Bioconductor contains more than 350. However, does
anyone have statistics on how often R (and possibly some R packages) are
downloaded, or on how many people actually use R?

Thanks,
    Kevin

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