On behalf of the editorial board, I am pleased to present Volume 12, Issue 1 of the R Journal and my second issue as the Editor in Chief. Since the last issue Simon Urbanek has joined the editorial board and we have made a few structural changes. First, the R Foundation has approved the R Journal having Associate Editors. This change will allow us to address the increase in submission volume. The addition of the new AE positions should help alleviate some of the workload the editors have been dealing with and will result in shorter turn-around times for submissions. Second, complete issues of the R Journal will no longer be published in a single pdf. The build process for the document was complex and time consuming and we were not seeing the volume of download that would justify the effort. Individual articles are still available and the issue layout is still shown in the “Current Issue” section of the web page.

In this issue

News from the R Foundation is included in this issue along with an update from the The R Foundation’s histoRicalg project, which documents historic and historical numerical algorithms and provides reference implementations in R. In addition, a reprint by John Chamber, documenting the history of R, which was initially published in the History of Programming Languages. Finally, this issue features 26 contributed research articles that have been categorized below.

Papers focusing on reproducibility, managing code and projects, and instruction:

  • ari: The Automated R Instructor
  • ProjectManagement: an R Package for Managing Projects
  • The Rockerverse: Packages and Applications for Containerisation with R
  • SimilaR: R Code Clone and Plagiarism Detection
  • Tools for Analyzing R Code the Tidy Way

Data exploration and visualization:

  • spinifex: An R Package for Creating a Manual Tour of Low-dimensional Projections of Multivariate Data
  • Variable Importance Plots—An Introduction to the vip Package

Astronomy

  • rcosmo R Package for Analysis of Spherical, HEALPix and Cosmological Data

Medicine and epidemiology

  • Individual-Level Modelling of Infectious Disease Data: EpiILM

Probability distributions and processes

  • BayesMallows: An R Package for the Bayesian Mallows Model
  • gk: An R Package for the g-and-k and Generalised g-and-h Distributions
  • Linear Fractional Stable Motion with the rlfsm R Package
  • mistr: A Computational Framework for Mixture and Composite Distributions
  • mudfold: An R Package for Nonparametric IRT Modelling of Unfolding Processes
  • NlinTS: An R Package For Causality Detection in Time Series
  • npordtests: An R Package of Nonparametric Tests for Equality of Location Against Ordered Alternatives
  • Skew-t Expected Information Matrix Evaluation and Use for Standard Error Calculations
  • tsmp: An R Package for Time Series with Matrix Profile
  • The R package NonProbEst for estimation in non-probability surveys

Supervised learning

  • CopulaCenR: Copula based Regression Models for Bivariate Censored Data in R
  • CoxPhLb: An R Package for Analyzing Length Biased Data under Cox Model
  • difNLR: Generalized Logistic Regression Models for DIF and DDF Detection
  • lspartition: Partitioning-Based Least Squares Regression
  • Mapping Smoothed Spatial Effect Estimates from Individual-Level Data: MapGAM
  • SortedEffects: Sorted Causal Effects in R
  • SurvBoost: An R Package for High-Dimensional Variable Selection in the Stratified Proportional Hazards Model via Gradient Boosting