Navigating the R Package Universe

Authors

Julia Silge, Stack Overflow
John C. Nash, University of Ottawa
Spencer Graves, EffectiveDefense.org

Date of this Version

12-2018

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (December 2018) 10(2); Editor: John Verzani

Comments

Copyright 2018, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 4.0 International

Abstract

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 commoninterfaces for alternative approaches to essentially the same problem.