Every R package has its story. Some packages are written by experts, some bynovices. Some are developed quickly, others were long in the making. This is thestory of jstor, a package which I developed during my time as a student ofsociology, working in a research project on the scientific elite withinsociology.

Background Surveys are ubiquitous in the social sciences, and the best of them are meticulously planned out. Statisticians often decide on a sample size based on a theoretical design, and then proceed to inflate this number to account for “sample losses”. This ensures that the desired sample size is achieved, even in the presence of non-response.

Hundreds of thousands of people in east Africa have been displaced and hundreds have died as a result of torrential rains which ended a drought but saturated soils and engorged rivers, resulting in extreme flooding in 2018.This post will explore these events using the R package smapr, which provides access to global satellite-derived soil moisture data collected by the NASA Soil Moisture Active-Passive (SMAP) mission and abstracts away some of

In this technote I will outline what phylotaR was developed for, how to install it and how to run it with some simple examples.What is phylotaR? In any phylogenetic analysis it is important to identify sequences that share the same orthology – homologous sequences separated by speciation events. This is often performed by simply searching an online sequence repository using sequence labels.

eBird is an online tool for recording birdobservations. The eBird database currently contains over 500 millionrecords of bird sightings, spanning every country and nearly every birdspecies, making it an extremely valuable resource for bird research andconservation. These data can be used to map the distribution andabundance of species, and assess how species’ ranges are changing overtime. This dataset is available for download as a text file;

R packages are widely used in science, yet the code behind them often does not come under scrutiny. To address this lack, rOpenSci has been a pioneer in developing a peer review process for R packages. The goal of pkginspector is to help that process by providing a means to better understand the internal structure of R packages.

Evolutionary biologists are increasingly using R for building,editing and visualizing phylogenetic trees.The reproducible code-based workflow and comprehensive array of toolsavailable in packages such as ape,phangorn andphytools make R an ideal platform forphylogenetic analysis.Yet the many different tree formats are not well integrated,as pointed out in a recentpost.

Part of rOpenSci’s mission is to create technical infrastructure in the form of carefully vetted R software tools that lower barriers to working with data sources on the web. Our open peer software review system for community-contributed tools is a key component of this. As the rOpenSci community grows and more package authors submit their work for peer review, we need to expand our editorial board to maintain a speedy process.

Introduction I never thought that I’d be programming software in my career. I startedusing R a little over 2 years now and it’s been one of the most importantdecisions in my career. Secluded in a small academic office with no oneto discuss/interact about my new hobby, I started searching the web fortutorials and packages. After getting to know how amazing and nurturingthe R community is, it made me want to become a data scientist.

Our onboarding processensures that packages contributed by the community undergo atransparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process.Before even submitting my first R package to rOpenSci onboarding systemin December 2015, I spent a fair amount of time reading through previousissue threads in order to assess whether onboarding was a friendly placefor me: a newbie, very motivated to learn more but a newbie nonetheless.I soon got