[OT] How many useRs?

Ahem!

 	RSiteSearch("user base")

I figured the devel list would have people on it who might know the
answer to this....



Is there a reliable (for some definition of reliable) estimate of how
many people use R or have downloaded it? Say an order of magnitude
estimate? I would like to mention this in the introduction to a paper
I'm writing where I encourage R's use.



Thanks for any help.



-Andy






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Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
                                             Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	            UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901

I've seen that thread. Given the way R use has increased over the last
three and a half years I thought it not unlikely that somebody might
have taken a stab at this again.

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles C. Berry [mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu] 
Sent: Monday, August 27, 2007 3:44 PM
To: Andy Bunn
Cc: r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] [OT] How many useRs?



Ahem!

 	RSiteSearch("user base")

I figured the devel list would have people on it who might know the
answer to this....



Is there a reliable (for some definition of reliable) estimate of how
many people use R or have downloaded it? Say an order of magnitude
estimate? I would like to mention this in the introduction to a paper
I'm writing where I encourage R's use.



Thanks for any help.



-Andy






	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

______________________________________________
R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
                                             Dept of Family/Preventive
Medicine
E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	            UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego
92093-0901

| Is there a reliable (for some definition of reliable) estimate of how
| many people use R or have downloaded it? Say an order of magnitude
| estimate? I would like to mention this in the introduction to a paper
| I'm writing where I encourage R's use.

With a salt mine rather than a mere grain of salt, you could consider the
'popularity contest' results from Debian and Ubuntu.  Briefly, it's an
'opt-in' service that submits the list of installed packages, anonymoysly, to
an aggregation address.   

Using Ubuntu's large install base, we get from http://popcon.ubuntu.com that
eg the GNU bc package in their 'main/math' section is installed (and
reported) 174452 times (based on http://popcon.ubuntu.com/main/math/by_inst).
As this is a mandatory package, we can use this as the baseline.  On the
other hand r-base-core (from the optional universe/math section) is installed
2638 times (see http://popcon.ubuntu.com/universe/math/by_inst).
So you get 2638 / 174452 or around 1.5%.  You now need to figure the various
self-selection biases and correct for those...

As a check, for Debian (with popcon.debian.org as the base URL), we get 1686
/ 54221 or around 3.1% (using file http://popcon.debian.org/main/math/by_inst).  
So even this crude measure has a large amount of variability.  So I still
invoke fortune(43).  

But if you insist, you could use Microsoft's recent 'one billion PCs'
estimate (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2077986.stm), apply the percentages we
laboriously derive above and call it 15 to 31 million....

Dirk

Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.