Friday 6 September 2019

citations - Should I cite all R packages I used?


Intro: R is a open-source software tool for statistical analyses and graphics, which is heavily used in different science disciplines and which is becoming more and more popular (although it is already quite popular in many areas). In addition to the base version, people from all over the place develop so-called packages, upload them, for example, to CRAN, where they can be freely downloaded to use.


Q: I am writing a manuscript for a peer-reviewed psychology journal and used a lot of R packages in my work. Of course, I want to and will cite R itself and the packages that I relied on heavily (e.g., to simulate or analyze data). However, I have also some packages, of which I used only a single, little function. For example, I used the odd function from the gtools package to determine whether an integer is odd or even. As far as I can see, the function is only a single line long, and I could have written it myself (but I didn't!). On the one hand, I want to give credit to these developers, on the other hand I don't want to blow up my reference list and confuse readers. So the question is, should I cite every single R package I used?


BTW: Note that R has the nice function citation("some package") to access citation information provided by the package authors; see also citation() to cite R itself.



Answer



Overall, I would suggest you err on the side of rather citing too many packages (with version numbers, please!), although odd quite probably is a borderline case. I'd rationalize this tendency as a bit of balance for all the people who use packages extensively but do not cite them.


In general, I would certainly cite anything that saved me a non-trivial amount of own work (as in, "I could have done this myself, but it would likely have cost me half a day").


The length of your literature list should not really be a concern in the days of PDF publishing. And "we used R [3], packages foo [4] and bar [5] as well as multiple helper functions [6-10]" should not be too confusing to your readers.




This would possibly be more appropriate for Academia.SE.com. Perhaps you want to edit your question (explaining what R is, so the question is understandable outside the tag at SO) and flag it for migration.



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