Overview

The R Journal is the peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal, published by The R Foundation. It features short to medium length articles (up to 20 pages) covering topics of interest to users and developers of R. For example, description and implementation details of R packages, surveys or reviews of R software related to a particular area, applications of R software or descriptions of teaching resources related to R.

The R Journal reaches a wide audience and has a thorough review process. It has a generally increasing SJR impact factor. Papers are expected to be concise, clearly written, not too technical, clearly related to R, and follow reproducible practices. Additional technical details and examples could be included as supplementary material. Authors of refereed articles should take care to:

Article types

The R Journal accepts a variety of article topics including:

History

The R Journal was established in 2009, superseding the R News. For historical purposes it also a news section, that includes items from R Core, updates from CRAN and Bioconductor, foRwards activities and conference reports.

R Journal article summaries, for the last four years

The R Journal receives a large number of submissions, currently over 200 a year, and processing times and especially review times are highly variable. The summaries below shows that for published articles, the time from first submission to accept averages at under a year. Just a very small number of 2021 submissions await a final decision, and even for 2022 submissions, the majority of articles have received an accept/reject decision.

For published articles in the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, the boxplots show time from submission to accept by year of publication. Median number of days to accept is under a year. The barchart on the right refers to articles submitted in the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and reports the status as rejected, in progress or accepted/published. Papers labelled ‘in progress’ are under review or awaiting revisions.

Editorial board

Editor-in-Chief

Mark van der Loo, Statistics Netherlands and University of Leiden, The Netherlands

Executive editors

Associate editors

Editorial advisory board

Governance

The R Journal is run under the auspices of the R Foundation, and editors of the Journal are appointed by the Foundation board.

Past Editors-in-Chief

Vince Carey (2009), Peter Dalgaard (2010), Heather Turner (2011), Martyn Plummer (2012), Hadley Wickham (2013), Deepayan Sarkar (2014), Bettina Grün (2015), Michael Lawrence (2016), Roger Bivand (2017), John Verzani (2018), Norman Matloff (2019), Michael Kane (2020), Dianne Cook (2021), Catherine Hurley (2022), Simon Urbanek (2023)

Past Associate Editors