Navigating the R Package Universe

Today, the enormous number of contributed packages available to R users outstrips any given user’s ability to understand how these packages work, their relative merits, or how they are related to each other. We organized a plenary session at useR!2017 in Brussels for the R community to think through these issues and ways forward. This session considered three key points of discussion. Users can navigate the universe of R packages with (1) capabilities for directly searching for R packages, (2) guidance for which packages to use, e.g., from CRAN Task Views and other sources, and (3) access to common interfaces for alternative approaches to essentially the same problem.

Julia Silge , John C. Nash , Spencer Graves
2018-12-08

Supplementary materials

Supplementary materials are available in addition to this article. It can be downloaded at RJ-2018-058.zip

CRAN packages used

sos, CRANsearcher, utils, pkgdown, lfe, optimx

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

Econometrics, Optimization

Reuse

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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Silge, et al., "Navigating the R Package Universe", The R Journal, 2018

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2018-058,
  author = {Silge, Julia and Nash, John C. and Graves, Spencer},
  title = {Navigating the R Package Universe},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2018},
  note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2018-058},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2018-058},
  volume = {10},
  issue = {2},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {558-563}
}