[R] Summary: # of users of R, and biological examples of the use of R: addendum

[Ramon Diaz-Uriarte]

I apologize for accidentally omitting some of the answers I got; here they are:

**************
I use R regularly in my research in the pharmaceutical industry.  I have
used it for projects ranging from sample size and power curve estimation,
analysis of laboratory data with mixed effects models, to analysis of mass
spectrometry data.  I have helped biologists here install and use it in
limited ways, modifying scripts that I have provided them.  I look forward
to taking advantage of the new TCL/TK GUI scripting to facilitate that
further.  In fact, R is actually named as the statistical analysis tool used
for a patent we are preparing.

Before leaving academia last year, I also used R.  I have written two papers
that had analyses partially supported with R.

I also use S-Plus, depending on the task at hand.

Best of luck with your paper,

Matt

Matthew R. Nelson, Ph.D.
Information Scientist
Esperion Therapeutics, Inc.
3621 S. State St.
695 KMS Place
Ann Arbor, MI 48108

Phone: (734) 332-0506 x235
Fax: (734) 332-0516
email: mnelson at esperion.com
web: http://www.esperion.com


*****************

From: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>To: Thomas Lumley
<thomas at biostat.washington.edu> Cc: j.logsdon at lancaster.ac.uk, 
r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch


On Wed, Jun 21, 2000 at 08:36:23AM -0700, Thomas Lumley wrote:
> Also cases with fewer than 1 user, ie "Hmm. R looks like an interesting
> package. Maybe I should install it in case I need to do some statistics
> some time."
> or
> "We're a math department, we want all of the mathematical packages"
> or even people who install everything.
> 
> Obviously that last group will be overrepresented in the Debian popularity
> contest.

Well, popularity-contest tries to be a little smarter and uses atime and
ctime as reported by find(1) to differentiate between 'used' and 'installed
but not used' as well as 'recently installed' software.

The full result for r-base is 35 'recently used', 49 'installed but not
used' and 8 'recently upgraded'. 

However, your critic might still be valid here as upon installation, the
postinst script uses perl to adjust the R_PAPERSIZE based on paperconf(1).
This mightprobably triggers the atime upon package upgrade. 

Dirk


*******************

Useful info from Dirk but this measures number of R Linux installations,
not users.  If 100K is an approximate number of R Linux installations,
then the likely number of Linux R users could be somewhat more.  In my
case, I have one installation and one user since only I use it but I am
sure that there are many cases with 2, 10, 100 etc users per installation.

In addition, as Dirk says, there will be a substantial number of non-Linux
users on other Unix platforms as well as Windows.

Anyone care to make a guess?  I would estimate that there are 1/2 million
actual R users but this could be out by a sd */2 at least.  

John  JohnFrom: j.logsdon at lancaster.ac.uk

***********************************





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