On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Michael Friendly wrote:
One could complement that by a
url = {http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=tweedie}
In two recent in press articles where I cited R packages,
I was asked by the copy-editor to add a location or url to the references.
Could I suggest that citation() be modified to include
the URL automatically?
That's a good suggestion and one that I discussed several times with Kurt.
The problem is that citation() only looks at the installed package which
doesn't know where it came from. Thus, I have AFAIK no simple means of
checking whether a particular package I'm using was obtained from CRAN,
Bioc, R-Forge, or some local source package. Hence, the URL cannot be
included automatically.
I agree that this would be nice to have. One idea would be that the CRAN
maintainer adds a line to the DESCRIPTION file upon release to CRAN. There
are a few ideas how to do this exactly and it's not yet implemented.
As a package maintainer, however, you can improve the situation for your
own packages by writing a CITATION file that has the CRAN URL in it. For
example, the first citEntry() in the "colorspace" package has:
## R >= 2.8.0 passes package metadata to citation().
if(!exists("meta") || is.null(meta)) meta <-
packageDescription("colorspace")
year <- sub("-.*", "", meta$Date)
note <- sprintf("R package version %s", meta$Version)
citEntry(entry = "Manual",
title = "{colorspace}: Color Space Manipulation",
author = personList(as.person("Ross Ihaka"),
as.person("Paul Murrell"),
as.person("Kurt Hornik"),
as.person("Achim Zeileis")),
year = year,
note = note,
url = "http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=colorspace";,
textVersion =
paste("Ross Ihaka, Paul Murrell, Kurt Hornik, Achim Zeileis",
sprintf("(%s).", year),
"colorspace: Color Space Manipulation.",
paste(note, ".", sep = ""),
"URL http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=colorspace";)
)
Best wishes,
Z
In the function, this would entail replacing the line
z$url <- meta$URL
with something like
z$url <- if (is.null(meta$URL) paste("http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=";,
package, sep="") else meta$URL
I say "something like" because I'm not sure how to handle other repositories.
Along similar lines, someone recently posted a script to generate
a .bib file for all packages installed. It would be useful if someone
were to implement that script for CRAN and make the resulting
R-packages.bib file available on the CRAN site.
-Michael
--
Michael Friendly Email: friendly AT yorku DOT ca
Professor, Psychology Dept.
York University Voice: 416 736-5115 x66249 Fax: 416 736-5814
4700 Keele Street http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/friendly.html
Toronto, ONT M3J 1P3 CANADA
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