R devel - Aug 2007 - [OT] How many useRs?

I figured the devel list would have people on it who might know the
answer to this....

 

Is there a reliable (for some definition of reliable) estimate of how
many people use R or have downloaded it? Say an order of magnitude
estimate? I would like to mention this in the introduction to a paper
I'm writing where I encourage R's use.

 

Thanks for any help.

 

-Andy

 

 


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Ahem!

 	RSiteSearch("user base")


On Mon, 27 Aug 2007, Andy Bunn wrote:
> I figured the devel list would have people on it who might know the
> answer to this....
>
>
>
> Is there a reliable (for some definition of reliable) estimate of how
> many people use R or have downloaded it? Say an order of magnitude
> estimate? I would like to mention this in the introduction to a paper
> I'm writing where I encourage R's use.
>
>
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
>
>
> -Andy
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
                                             Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	            UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901

On 27 August 2007 at 13:19, Andy Bunn wrote:
| Is there a reliable (for some definition of reliable) estimate of how
| many people use R or have downloaded it? Say an order of magnitude
| estimate? I would like to mention this in the introduction to a paper
| I'm writing where I encourage R's use.

With a salt mine rather than a mere grain of salt, you could consider the
'popularity contest' results from Debian and Ubuntu.  Briefly, it's
an
'opt-in' service that submits the list of installed packages,
anonymoysly, to
an aggregation address.   

Using Ubuntu's large install base, we get from http://popcon.ubuntu.com that
eg the GNU bc package in their 'main/math' section is installed (and
reported) 174452 times (based on http://popcon.ubuntu.com/main/math/by_inst).
As this is a mandatory package, we can use this as the baseline.  On the
other hand r-base-core (from the optional universe/math section) is installed
2638 times (see http://popcon.ubuntu.com/universe/math/by_inst).
So you get 2638 / 174452 or around 1.5%.  You now need to figure the various
self-selection biases and correct for those...

As a check, for Debian (with popcon.debian.org as the base URL), we get 1686
/ 54221 or around 3.1% (using file http://popcon.debian.org/main/math/by_inst).
So even this crude measure has a large amount of variability.  So I still
invoke fortune(43).  

But if you insist, you could use Microsoft's recent 'one billion
PCs'
estimate (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2077986.stm), apply the percentages we
laboriously derive above and call it 15 to 31 million....

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.