Monthly Summary of Selected Trends, Activities, and Insights for R – September 2018

R Tools & Languages R Central R Trendsposted by R Central October 30, 2018 R Central

In September, there was a serious spike in activities across the R ecosystem. This article examines a summary of selected R trends,...

In September, there was a serious spike in activities across the R ecosystem. This article examines a summary of selected R trends, activities, and insights in September.

Data for the trends and activities summarized here were obtained from popular websites used by the R community such as Google, GitHub, StackOverflow, Rstudio, METACRAN, and R-Bloggers

1. StackOverflow

Number of StackOverflow Questions tagged R: 4,423 (down 3.2% from August)
Number of Answers for R questions: 4,180 (down 11% from August)
Number of Comments for R questions: 8,253 (down 9.3% from August)
Page Views for R questions: 156,410 (down 10% from August)

Source

The pie chart below shows distribution of the questions, answers and comments for R at StackOverflow:

2. R/Packages Downloads

The data for this section is obtained through the API of METACRAN‘s service.

METACRAN obtains the download summaries from the RStudio CRAN mirror taken from here. This is one very popular download mirror for the R language due to the popularity of the RStudio IDE for R.

Base R downloads: 117,610 (up 91% from August)

The chart below shows the distribution of base R downloads among the computer operating systems from which R was downloaded.

The chart to the right shows the number of downloads by R versions. From the chart, it is clear that there are R coders who still make use of older R versions e.g. version 2.x.x series. Most users are always upgrading to newer versions of R.

R Packages Downloads: 58,503,751 (up 40% from August)

Package downloads suddenly increased this month.

The chart below shows the daily download variation of R packages in September.

Ratio of Base R downloads to R Package downloads: 1 : 497

Thus, for each download of base R, there are over 497 extension packages downloaded. The use of R still depends largely on extension packages.

This chart visualizes the ratio of Base R downloads to R packages downloads:

Sum of Downloads for Top 50 packages: 21, 656, 551 (up 37% from August)

Download contribution of Top 50 packages amongst other 12,000+ CRAN packages: 37%
(i.e, 37% of total R package downloads came from Top 50 packages in August)

Below is a chart showing the top 50 downloaded packages based on their download counts.

Sum of Downloads for Top 100 packages: 32,657,833 (up 38.6% from August)

Download contribution of Top 100 amongst other 12,000+ CRAN packages: 55.8%
(i.e, about 56% of R package downloads came from Top 100)

Top 10 Packages and their Primary Maintainers:

S/N	Package	Authors	Downloads
1	Rcpp	Dirk Eddelbuettel	740,644
2	stringi	Marek Gagolewski	657,395
3	rlang	Lionel Henry	648,483
4	ggplot2	Hadley Wickham	634,530
5	digest	Dirk Eddelbuettel	631,216
6	glue	Jim Hester	580,750
7	stringr	Hadley Wickham	560,129
8	tibble	Kirill Müller	530,092
9	pillar	Kirill Müller	529,884
10	fansi	Brodie Gaslam	519,361

Hadley Wickham, Dirk Eddelbuetel and Kirill Müller respectively dominate the top 10 by both number of packages and downloads from the list above. An important note: stringi, stringr, glue and fansi are packages for string-related tasks.

3. GitHub

The Top 10 R repositories that appeared on GitHub’s trends in September are:

1. gganatogram by Jesper Maag
2. analytics by Dhiraj Upadhyaya
3. dplyr by Hadley Wickham
4. r4ds by Hadley Wickham
5. ggplot2 by Hadley Wickham
6. gganimate by Thomas Lin Pedersen
7. bookdown by Yihui Xie
8. shiny by RStudio
9. dataviz by Claus Wilke
10. whattheyforgot by Jenny Bryan

The chart below shows the number of stars for gotten in September for top 10 repositories that did trend in September based on data from https://github.com/trending/r?since=monthly on October 1, 2018:

4. R Meetings/Events

The Rstudio Community website provides a weekly list of R user group meetings and conference events curated from meetup.com and elsewhere. The data found on this website is the basis for the following analysis.

There were 101 events in about 25 countries (36% up in events from August)

51 events out of 101 (50% of events) were held in the United States.

S/N	Country	Events
1	Australia	3
2	Belgium	1
3	Brazil	1
4	Canada	3
5	Colombia	1
6	Costa Rica	1
7	Ethiopia	1
8	France	2
9	Germany	5
10	Hungary	1
11	Ireland	1
12	Italy	1
13	Netherlands	2
14	New Zealand	1
15	Nigeria	5
16	Norway	1
17	Philippines	1
18	Serbia	1
19	South Africa	1
20	Spain	1
21	Sweden	1
22	Switzerland	3
23	Taiwan	3
24	United Kingdom	9
25	United States	51

A world map showing the distribution of R events across 25 countries:

Event distribution across the 25 countries in a pie (area) chart:

A weekly summary of events compared between countries for the month:

R-Ladies
38 events out of 101 (38% of events) were R-Ladies events

5. R Bloggers

Rbloggers.com is the most popular news aggregation website for blog posts related to the R language. There were about 226 blog posts at Rbloggers.com in August. An average of about 7 posts per day.

6. Google Trends

The chart below shows Google Trends for the R language in September, with search trends dipping only during the weekends.

Based on Interest by region, the Top 5 countries in September with the highest search activity on Google were:

Philippines
China
St. Helena
South Korea
Singapore

(Source)

7. R Language Ranking:

TIOBE Index: 18th in September, 2018

Redmonk: 14th in June, 2018

8. R Consortium

Calls for proposals were announced in September and will be due on October 31, 2018.

Biography

R Central is a developing aggregation website for news, trends and activities around the R language. It provides a dashboard which is suitable as a browser homepage that lists posts from popular sources like CRAN, R-devel, Twitter, Rbloggers, Crantastic, RWeekly, Microsoft, RConsortium, StackOverflow and several others.

Reference Links
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