Skip to main content

Fundamentals of Quantitative Analysis

D Citing R and RStudio

How to cite R and RStudio

You may be some way off writing a scientific report where you have to cite and reference R, however, when the time comes it is important to do so to give the people who built it (most of them for free!) credit. You should provide separate citations for R, RStudio, and the packages you use.

To get the citation for the version of R you are using, simply run the citation() function which will always provide you with the most recent citation.

## 
## To cite R in publications use:
## 
##   R Core Team (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical
##   computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
##   URL https://www.R-project.org/.
## 
## A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
## 
##   @Manual{,
##     title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing},
##     author = {{R Core Team}},
##     organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
##     address = {Vienna, Austria},
##     year = {2021},
##     url = {https://www.R-project.org/},
##   }
## 
## We have invested a lot of time and effort in creating R, please cite it
## when using it for data analysis. See also 'citation("pkgname")' for
## citing R packages.

To generate the citation for any packages you are using, you can also use the citation() function with the name of the package you wish to cite.

citation("tidyverse")
## 
##   Wickham et al., (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open
##   Source Software, 4(43), 1686, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686
## 
## A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
## 
##   @Article{,
##     title = {Welcome to the {tidyverse}},
##     author = {Hadley Wickham and Mara Averick and Jennifer Bryan and Winston Chang and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Romain François and Garrett Grolemund and Alex Hayes and Lionel Henry and Jim Hester and Max Kuhn and Thomas Lin Pedersen and Evan Miller and Stephan Milton Bache and Kirill Müller and Jeroen Ooms and David Robinson and Dana Paige Seidel and Vitalie Spinu and Kohske Takahashi and Davis Vaughan and Claus Wilke and Kara Woo and Hiroaki Yutani},
##     year = {2019},
##     journal = {Journal of Open Source Software},
##     volume = {4},
##     number = {43},
##     pages = {1686},
##     doi = {10.21105/joss.01686},
##   }

To generate the citation for the version of RStudio you are using, you can use the RStudio.Vesion() function:

RStudio.Version()

Finally, here's an example of how that might look in the write-up of your method section:

Analysis was conducted using R (R Core Team, 2020), RStudio (Rstudio Team, 2020), and the tidyverse package (Wickham, 2017).

As noted, you may not have to do this for a while, but come back to this when you do because it's important to give the open-source community credit for their work.