The R Journal: article published in 2016, volume 8:2

Measurement Units in R
Edzer Pebesma, Thomas Mailund and James Hiebert , The R Journal (2016) 8:2, pages 486-494.

Abstract We briefly review SI units, and discuss R packages that deal with measurement units, their compatibility and conversion. Built upon udunits2 and the UNIDATA udunits library, we introduce the package units that provides a class for maintaining unit metadata. When used in expression, it automatically converts units, and simplifies units of results when possible; in case of incompatible units, errors are raised. The class flexibly allows expansion beyond predefined units. Using units may eliminate a whole class of potential scientific programming mistakes. We discuss the potential and limitations of computing with explicit units.

Received: 2016-07-12; online 2016-12-12
CRAN packages: lubridate, sp, measurements, NISTunits, udunits2, units, ggplot2, spacetime, h5, RNetCDF, sos4R
CRAN Task Views implied by cited CRAN packages: Spatial, SpatioTemporal, Graphics, Phylogenetics, ReproducibleResearch, TimeSeries

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license .

@article{RJ-2016-061,
  author = {Edzer Pebesma and Thomas Mailund and James Hiebert},
  title = {{Measurement Units in R}},
  year = {2016},
  journal = {{The R Journal}},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2016-061},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2016-061},
  pages = {486--494},
  volume = {8},
  number = {2}
}