Hi All, I've been fiddling around with various ways to estimate the popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Minitab, Statistica, Systat, BMDP, S-PLUS, R-PLUS and Revolution R. It's not an easy task. You can see what I've come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure people will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me know what you think. Cheers, Bob ======================================================== Bob Muenchen (pronounced Min'-chen), Manager Research Computing Support Voice: (865) 974-5230 Email: muenchen at utk.edu Web: http://oit.utk.edu/research, News: http://oit.utk.edu/research/news.php Feedback: http://oit.utk.edu/feedback/ =========================================================
Am 20.06.2010 15:31, schrieb Muenchen, Robert A (Bob):> I've been fiddling around with various ways to estimate the popularity > of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Minitab, Statistica, Systat, BMDP, S-PLUS, > R-PLUS and Revolution R. It's not an easy task. You can see what I've > come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure people > will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me know > what you think.Your analysis is quite web-based. But to define what popular means is - I believe - hard. R is open source and very broad in its different applications so of course it generates much more e-mail and web traffic because there are many different uses and users. SPSS and Stata for example are closed and very specialized. You get support also directly from the company and do not necessarily need a mailing list. Does this mean that they are less popular? I'd say no. So the question I would raise here is whether it is a fair comparison? I know that is a sufficient statistics-subset like panel econometrics Stata is by far leading and for time series econometrics Eviews, Gauss in research. I would say that in the industry that I know plus in econometrics research those programs are much more widespread or "popular". To measure their popularity I would say a industry-and-education-wide-questionnaire should be used. Plus it is not sufficient so I would also name Matlab, Gauss, Ox, Eviews from the areas of my "interest" (econometrics) as "popular" proprietary software. I do not deny that R is becoming more popular, but I doubt whether mailing lists and search requests are enough to prove this hypothesis. My 2cents Stefan
You would probably need to talk to the people maintaining the mirrors as you would need access to the download statistics. I presume that the IP addresses of the people who download are also stored somewhere, so you could possibly georeference the download statistics. Flame mode on Then you could analyze everything with SAS and email the results to the SAS corporation to see if they appreciate the (not so subtle) irony. Flame mode off Seriously though, I'd expect the download statistics to uncover a substantially higher use base than the figures you initially posted suggest. Christos> Subject: RE: [R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata... > Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 21:11:14 -0400 > From: muenchen@utk.edu > To: argchris@hotmail.com > > > > >-----Original Message----- > >From: r-help-bounces@r-project.org > [mailto:r-help-bounces@r-project.org] > >On Behalf Of Christos Argyropoulos > >Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2010 6:26 PM > >To: r-help@r-project.org > >Subject: Re: [R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata... > > > > > >How about getting statistics of downloads of the R-base from the > >different CRAN mirrors ? > > I'd love to do that but there are lots of mirrors. Does anyone know of a > way to automate such a search? Thanks, Bob > > > > >This should (in principle) allow one to estimate the total # of people > >who intended to use R at some point in their life. > > > >It may even be possible to analyze those numbers for temporal trends > >since the day of release of each R version is known. > > > >Christos > > > >_________________________________________________________________ > >Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > > >______________________________________________ > >R-help@r-project.org mailing list > >https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > >PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting- > >guide.html > >and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code._________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
Nice work. I'm interested in trends more than absolutes. Is there any way you could track the number of citations to the R package? E.g. http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?as_q=&as_epq=R%3A+A+Language+and+Environment+for+Statistical+Computing except I think there are better citation indexes available (it has been too long since I worked in academia but someone here will know what they are). I guess you won't get quite the same for the commercial tools, though "SAS Institute" and similar searches will give some results. Double points if your citation database has a classification of the papers so we could see R usage trends in physics, biology, social sciences, .... :-) Allan On 20/06/10 14:31, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:> Hi All, > > I've been fiddling around with various ways to estimate the popularity > of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Minitab, Statistica, Systat, BMDP, S-PLUS, > R-PLUS and Revolution R. It's not an easy task. You can see what I've > come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure people > will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me know > what you think. > > Cheers, > Bob > > ========================================================> Bob Muenchen (pronounced Min'-chen), Manager > Research Computing Support > Voice: (865) 974-5230 > Email: muenchen at utk.edu > Web: http://oit.utk.edu/research, > News: http://oit.utk.edu/research/news.php > Feedback: http://oit.utk.edu/feedback/ > ========================================================> > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >
To me R is just another programming language. In fact it seems to share quite a lot of the characteristics of "fashionable" languages such as python - for example dynamic typing amonst others. The fact it happens to be good for statistics and other mathematical stuff is a bonus. David -------------------------- David Jessop Global Head of Quantitative Research UBS Investment Research +44 20 7567 9882 ----- Original Message ----- From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org <r-help-bounces at r-project.org> To: Patrick Burns <pburns at pburns.seanet.com> Cc: r-help at r-project.org <r-help at r-project.org> Sent: Tue Jun 22 14:38:38 2010 Subject: Re: [R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata... Hehe, You do have a point in not calling R a statistical language. It is indeed far more than that; Yet, I don't agree that statistics is done by stuffy professors. Wished it was so, but alas, last time I looked at my paycheck I had to conclude that I might be stuffy, but I'm far from being paid as a professor... Cheers Joris On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Patrick Burns <pburns at pburns.seanet.com> wrote:> I'll expand my statement slightly. > > Yes, Peter, you are the archetypical > stuffy professor. ?The truth hurts. > > By any reasonable metric that I've > thought of my company name is at least > one-third "statistics", from which a > common (and I think correct) inference > would be that I'm not anti-statistics. > > > There are two aspects of why I think > that R should not be called a statistical > program: marketing and reality. > > Marketing > > Identifying with the most dreaded experience > in university is not so good for "sales". > (Reducing stuffiness might reduce the root > problem here.) > > Reality > > R really is used for more than statistics. > Almost all of my use of R is outside the > realm of statistics. ?Maybe the field of > statistics should have claim on a lot of > that, but as of now that isn't the case. > > A Fusion > > R's real competition is not SAS or SPSS, but > Excel. ?As Brian has pointed out before, > the vast majority of statistics is actually > done in Excel. ?Is Excel a statistics program? > I don't think many people think that -- neither > statisticians nor non-statisticians. > > Pat > > > On 21/06/2010 10:32, Joris Meys wrote: >> >> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Patrick Burns >> <pburns at pburns.seanet.com> ?wrote: >>> >>> (Statistics is what stuffy professors >>> do, I just look at my data and try to >>> figure out what it means.) >> >> Often those stuffy professors have a reason to do so. When they want >> an objective view on the data for example, or an objective measure of >> the significance of a hypothesis. But you're right, who cares about >> objectiveness these days? It doesn't sell you a paper, does it? >> >> Cheers >> Joris >> >> > > -- > Patrick Burns > pburns at pburns.seanet.com > http://www.burns-stat.com > (home of 'Some hints for the R beginner' > and 'The R Inferno') >-- Joris Meys Statistical consultant Ghent University Faculty of Bioscience Engineering Department of Applied mathematics, biometrics and process control tel : +32 9 264 59 87 Joris.Meys at Ugent.be ------------------------------- Disclaimer : http://helpdesk.ugent.be/e-maildisclaimer.php ______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -------------- next part -------------- Issued by UBS AG or affiliates to professional investors for information only and its accuracy/completeness is not guaranteed. 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On 06/20/10 02:31 PM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:> Hi All, > > I've been fiddling around with various ways to estimate the popularity > of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Minitab, Statistica, Systat, BMDP, S-PLUS, > R-PLUS and Revolution R. It's not an easy task. You can see what I've > come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure people > will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me know > what you think. > > Cheers, > Bob >I don't know how practical it is with R, but with Mathematica, MATLAB etc, job adverts is a good bet if you care about outside academia. I found very few job ads wanting Mathematica skills, but lots wanting MATLAB. I doubt it is practical to search on the letter R though. jobsite.com, monstir.com etc Dave
On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) <muenchen at utk.edu> wrote:> come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure people > will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me know > what you think. >This is not much of a metric, probably not even a ballpark, but I have a habit of measuring the popularity of a software by the number of unread messages in my mail account, sent to one of its main mailing lists. For example, I subscribed to Gentoo, Xfce and LyX MLs much earlier than to that of R, but R quickly and surpassed all in number of unread messages. At the moment I have the following: R ( 37k), LyX (10k), Debian (7k), Xfce (<3k), Geany (.5k). I dare say that R might be more popular than Debian, but again, any such estimation seems farfetched. Regards Liviu