Variety and Mainstays of the R Developer Community

Graduate School of Education, Stanford University

lijinzhang@stanford.edu

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame

xli34@nd.edu

Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame

zzhang4@nd.edu

Abstract

The thriving developer community has a significant impact on the widespread use of R software. To better understand this community, we conducted a study analyzing all R packages available on CRAN. We identified the most popular topics of R packages by text mining the package descriptions. Additionally, using network centrality measures, we discovered the important packages in the package dependency network and influential developers in the global R community. Our analysis showed that among the 20 topics identified in the topic model, Data Import, Export, and Wrangling, as well as Data Visualization, Result Presentation, and Interactive Web Applications, were particularly popular among influential packages and developers. These findings provide valuable insights into the R community.

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