Fig 1.
The daily downloads of R software (a) and R packages (b).
The boxplots show the daily download times within the month. The blue lines show the average daily download in each year. Source of data: http://cran-logs.rstudio.com/.
Fig 2.
Knowledge graph of R based on package description archived on CRAN.
Only top 50 keywords with largest frequency are displayed. The width of edge is proportional to the co-occurrence number.
Fig 3.
Top 10 R packages from 2005 to 2024.
Based on: (a) Total downloads during the period. (b) Monthly downloads by average during the period.
Fig 4.
Usage of R in academia between 2005 and 2024.
(a) Growth of academic articles citing R software. (b) The number of articles citing R software in different subject areas over time. (c) Top 10 subjects with most articles citing R software. (d) Top 10 subjects with most proportion of articles citing R software (calculated as the number of R-citing articles divided by the total number of publications in that subject area in Scopus). The subject classification is based on the list of Scopus Subject Area (AGRI: Agricultural and Biological Sciences; ARTS: Arts and Humanities; BIOC: Biochemistry, Genetics, and Molecular Biology; BUSI: Business, Management, and accounting; CENG: Chemical Engineering; CHEM: Chemistry; COMP: Computer Science; DECI: Decision Sciences; DENT: Dentistry; EART: Earth and Planetary Sciences; ECON: Economics, Econometrics, and Finance; ENER: Energy; ENGI: Engineering; ENVI: Environmental Science; HEAL: Health Professionals; IMMU: Immunology and Microbiology; MATE: Materials Science; MATH: Mathematics; MEDI: Medicine; MULT: Multidisciplinary; NEUR: Neuroscience; NURS: Nursing; PHAR: Pharmacology, Toxicology, and Pharmaceutics; PHYS: Physics and Astronomy; PSYC: Psychology; SOCI: Social Sciences; VETE: Veterinary).
Fig 5.
Collaboration patterns in R community.
(a) Distribution of R package author number (packages with more than 15 authors are omitted in the visualization). (b) Correlation between author number and number of imported packages. (c) Correlation between author number and daily download times in 2024.
Fig 6.
The ecosystem of R from different perspectives.
(a) From perspective of statistics. (b) From perspective of computer science. (c) From perspective of practitioners.