It may be worthwhile tracking citations in "early adopter" journals such
as statistical methodology journals, then watching trends in later
adopter subject matter journals (in medical research this might be JAMA,
NEJM).
Frank
On 06/21/2010 08:11 AM, Kjetil Halvorsen wrote:
One should also take into account the other R list. For example, as of
today the number of subscribers to
R-help-es (R-help for spanish speakers) is 290, increasing.
Kjetil Halvorsen
On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)
<muenc...@utk.edu> wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org
[mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org]
On Behalf Of Ted Harding
Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2010 3:42 PM
To: r-help@r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata...
I've given thought in the past to the question of estimating the R
user base, and came to the conclusion that it is impossible to get
an estimate of the number of users that one could trust (or even
put anything like a margin of error to).
I think one could get a number which represented a moderately
informative lower bound -- just count the number of different email
addresses that have ever posted to the R-help list. This will of
course include people who post (or have posted) from more than one
email address, and people who tried R for a while and then dropped
it, but my feeling is that these are likely to be outweighed by the
number of people who have used R but have never posted (for example
students who are getting their R help from their instructors, people
using R in a corporate context who are discouraged from posting to
public lists, etc.).
Ted, that's a very interesting suggestion. Do you know of a practical
way of getting that count?
The number of subscribers to R-help (currently about 10200) is
a definite lower bound for the number of R users, but many users
post to R-help without being subscribed.
10,200 is quite an amazing number! Here are the number of subscribers
to:
SAS-L 3,251
SPSSX-L 2,103
Statlist 1,847
S-PLUS - havn't figured out how to get this yet
How did you get the R-help figure?
I would expect that the total number of different email addresses
that have posted to R-help would be considerably larger than 10200.
I don't think a "Mark-Recapture" approach is feasible.
Further, I don't know how one might take account of the fact that
some installations of R (e.g. on a corporate or institutional
or departmental server) may each be used by several users.
The server question in particular intrigues me. Research organizations
are stuffed with high performance clusters. The cost of all the
commercial packages is just incredible. Even at the heavily discounted
rate academia gets, they're still unaffordable. However, if queried we'd
find the commercial packages on them, but limited to 4 out of 2,500
nodes! You might see the reverse in industry, with one mainframe copy of
SAS serving hundreds of users.
Cheers,
Bob
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding)<ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk>
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Date: 20-Jun-10 Time: 20:41:43
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
--
Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chairman School of Medicine
Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University
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