[R] Making a case for using R in Academia

[Charilaos Skiadas]

John (and everyone else),

On Nov 9, 2006, at 4:20 PM, John Fox wrote:

> 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.

Yes it certainly isn't an easy question to answer, and I don't  
necessarily need complete data. The situation as presented to me by  
my colleagues in the Social Sciences is really that SPSS is "the  
standard", so I am basically hoping for evidence to just shake this  
view (unless it is true, but I have to say I doubt it). I am more  
hoping for particular examples of cases in the Social Sciences, where  
SPSS is far from the standard, and the programs and schools you  
mention below are exactly the sort of thing I was looking for!

For now unfortunately we will be sticking with SPSS, despite the  
considerable cost (which was mainly our problem at the moment, so SAS  
is not even being considered for that reason), but I am hoping to  
slowly build enough evidence of the extensive use of R for when all  
this comes up again. Even just a list of the universities and  
departments that use it would be very helpful, so any of you who  
would like to send such information about your departments or other  
departments you might know about, off the list, it would be extremely  
helpful to me.

Perhaps it would be useful for such a list to exist somewhere  
online?  (I guess you could say "google", but I find it hard to use  
google to look up such information on R, for the obvious reason of  
the shortness of the name.

> [snip]
>
> 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.

Thanks, I will be looking into those. I basically just need to look  
at various universities and their social sciences departments, and  
see what they use there. As other suggested, I will be looking into  
the number of books and papers in R and how it is increasing every year.

Once again thank you all for your comments, this has been a very  
helpful discussion for me, and it's a great pleasure to find such a  
helpful and friendly mailing list.

> Of course, my own preference is for R.
>
> Regards,
>  John

Haris