[R] Making a case for using R in Academia

[John Fox]

Dear Charilaos,

It's very difficult to give definitive answers to the questions that you
pose because we don't have any good data (at least as far as I know) about
how widely R is used. I recall a claim, I think on the r-help list, that R
is now second to SAS in use world-wide, but I'm not sure how one would
establish that. I do, however, have anecdotal evidence about R use that may
be of some help, and perhaps others can contribute their impressions,
especially if they differ from mine.

I think that it's fair to say that the S language is more or less the
standard among statisticians, and that R has now far surpassed S-PLUS in
use. For rough evidence one could look, for example, to the relative levels
of activity on the r-help and s-news email lists.

Among social scientists the picture is not as clear. My impression is that
SPSS is used very widely for low-levels methods courses taught to
undergraduates, and not very extensively in the best social-science graduate
programmes. I would expect that, at present, Stata use in social-science
graduate programmes exceeds R, and that SAS and R would also be used fairly
widely. In my opinion, these are the only reasonable choices -- I don't
think that SPSS is sufficiently capable to compete with R, Stata, or SAS.
There are, for example, several different packages used at the ICPSR Summer
Program in Quantitative Methods for Social Research, but several relatively
advanced courses now use R. Likewise, the Oxford Spring School, hosted by
the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford, has mostly
employed R and Stata.

Of course, my own preference is for R.

Regards,
 John

--------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8S 4M4
905-525-9140x23604
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox 
-------------------------------- 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of 
> Charilaos Skiadas
> Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 11:18 AM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] Making a case for using R in Academia
> 
> As a addendum to all this, this is one of the responses I got 
> from one of my colleagues:
> 
> "The problem with R is that our students in many social science  
> fields, are expected to know SPSS when they go to graduate school.   
> Not having a background in SPSS would put these students at a 
> disadvantage."
> 
> Is this really the case? Does anyone have any such statistics?
> 
> Charilaos Skiadas
> Department of Mathematics
> Hanover College
> P.O.Box 108
> Hanover, IN 47243
> 
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