Who Did What? The Roles of R Package Authors and How to Refer to Them

Authors

Kurt Hornik, WU Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien
Duncan Murdoch, University of Western Ontario
Achim Zeileis, Universität Innsbruck

Date of this Version

6-2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (June 2012) 4(1)

Comments

Copyright 2012, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported

Abstract

Computational infrastructure for rep resenting persons and citations has been avail able in R for several years, but has been restructured through enhanced classes "person" and "bibentry" in recent versions of R. The new features include support for the specification of the roles of package authors (e.g. maintainer, author, contributor, translator, etc.) and more flexible formatting/printing tools among various other improvements. Here, we introduce the new classes and their methods and indicate how this functionality is employed in the management of R packages. Specifically, we show how the authors of R packages can be specified along with their roles in package ‘DESCRIPTION’ and/or ‘CITATION’ files and the citations produced from it.