citing a package?
While the idea of writing a citable paper is great and
appropriate, I think the word "duty" is too strong. Competent
professionals can still make valuable contributions to the R Project
without this kind of external publication.
In academia, at least in the US, professors are paid in part to
publish. Outside of academia, anyone who wishes to publish has much less
support for doing so, and is often actively discouraged by intellectual
property clauses in employment contracts that require internal reviews
by people with little understanding of how "new knowledge" is created.
We should all be thankful for the contributions made to R by those
who can NOT even get credit for it in an annual performance review.
Their contributions should be judged on utility to other R users, not on
whether it is converted into a separate publication.
just my humble opinion.
spencer graves
Jari Oksanen wrote:
On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 16:21, Martin Henry H. Stevens wrote:
How do I cite a package (not R itself - I know how to do that)? Any thoughts or links? Many thanks in advance?
I think it is the duty of a package author to write a citable paper, if he thinks that such is needed. It could be useful to have this kind of information easily available in the package, so that you do not have to ask the authors how to cite their package. A natural looking place for this kind of information is the package DESCRIPTION. However, there is no standard entry for citation there. Now it seems that some packages have a hint to citing (for instance, MASS: "Functions and datasets to support Venables and Ripley, 'Modern Applied Statistics with S' (4th edition)"), while some book-backed packages have no pointers to the book (nlme, for instance). However, all CRAN packages have a pdf file of the package documentation in CRAN. If citing URL is allowed in the journal, this is a place to point. cheers, jari oksanen