rOpenSci

Stefanie Butland

We want to know how **you** use [rOpenSci packages](/packages/) and
resources so we can give them, their developers, and your examples more
visibility.

It's valuable to both users and developers of a package to see how it
has been used "in the wild". This goes a long way to encouraging people
to keep up development knowing there are others who appreciate and build
on their work. This also helps people imagine how they might use a
package to address their research question, and provides some code to
give them a head-start.

We have a dedicated [Use Cases
category](https://discuss.ropensci.org/c/usecases) in our public
discussion forum and we encourage you to browse and add to it. As of
September 2019, there are \> 50 use cases, covering \> 30 packages. More
than half of these have been added by community members. These
complement the \> 800 citations of our tools in published works.

### Examples

- **visdat^[1](#fn:1){.footnote-ref role="doc-noteref"}^,
  skimr^[2](#fn:2){.footnote-ref role="doc-noteref"}^,
  assertr^[3](#fn:3){.footnote-ref role="doc-noteref"}^, Exploring and
  understanding a new data set**. [Sharla
  Gelfand](https://sharla.party/) used these packages to demonstrate how
  she approached a data set on public transit delays. She shared her
  code, slide deck, and an explanatory blog post. [\[**Use
  case**\]](https://discuss.ropensci.org/t/visdat-skimr-and-assertr-use-case-exploring-and-understanding-a-new-data-set/1620).

- **nasapower^[4](#fn:4){.footnote-ref role="doc-noteref"}^,
  rnaturalearth^[5](#fn:5){.footnote-ref role="doc-noteref"}^, Can
  rainfall be a useful predictor of epidemic risk across temporal and
  spatial scales?** [Emerson Del Ponte](https://delponte.netlify.com/)
  worked with [Adam Sparks](/authors/adam-sparks/) to access rainfall
  data for a specific time period of soybean growth over multiple
  seasons in two states in Brazil. It's being used to explore
  associations between rainfall and patterns of dispersal of a soybean
  fungal disease. Adam shared the code he used to access the data and
  create the maps for the presentation Emerson shared [\[**Use
  case**\]](https://discuss.ropensci.org/t/can-rainfall-be-a-useful-predictor-of-epidemic-risk-across-temporal-and/1701).

- **rOpenSci package development guide used in teaching and manuscript
  review^[6](#fn:6){.footnote-ref role="doc-noteref"}^**. [Tiffany
  Timbers](/authors/tiffany-timbers/), her teaching assistants, and
  students used our guide in teaching and evaluation in their
  Collaborative Software Development course in the University of British
  Columbia's Master of Data Science program [\[**Use
  case**\]](https://discuss.ropensci.org/t/teaching-how-to-create-high-quality-r-packages/1793).
  [Hao Ye](/authors/hao-ye/) used the guide in his review of a
  manuscript that included an R package [\[**Use
  case**\]](https://discuss.ropensci.org/t/use-of-r-package-review-guidelines-in-independent-manuscript-review/1795).

Browse the [use cases](https://discuss.ropensci.org/c/usecases) for
applications in academia, industry, government, or "just for fun", with
examples on biodiversity, ecology, text processing, bibliometrics,
workflows and reproducibility, weather, public health, bicycle networks,
agronomy, epidemiology, surveys, seafood mislabelling, tweets about
fires, and others!

### What's your use case?

If your use case is published on the web somewhere, please [tell us
about it](https://discuss.ropensci.org/c/usecases) in the forum. Here's
the template we created to guide you.

<figure>
<img
src="/img/blog-images/2019-10-15-usecases/usecases-template-shadow.png"
width="600"
alt="screenshot of use cases template with list of fields. List can be found by opening new topic at https://discuss.ropensci.org/c/usecases" />
</figure>

When you post your use case in the forum we'll tweet about it from
[@rOpenSci](https://twitter.com/rOpenSci) and we might feature it, with
attribution, in our [biweekly newsletter](https://news.ropensci.org/).

Developers and users will thank you!

::: {.footnotes role="doc-endnotes"}

------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.  ::: {#fn:1}
    Nicholas Tierney (2017). "visdat: Visualising Whole Data Frames."
    *JOSS*, *2*(16), 355. doi: 10.21105/joss.00355 (URL:
    <https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00355)>, \<URL:
    <http://dx.doi.org/10.21105/joss.00355%3E>. [↩︎](#fnref:1){.footnote-backref
    role="doc-backlink"}
    :::

2.  ::: {#fn:2}
    Elin Waring, Michael Quinn, Amelia McNamara, Eduardo Arino de la
    Rubia, Hao Zhu and Shannon Ellis (2019). skimr: Compact and Flexible
    Summaries of Data. R package version 1.0.7.
    <https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=skimr> [↩︎](#fnref:2){.footnote-backref
    role="doc-backlink"}
    :::

3.  ::: {#fn:3}
    Tony Fischetti (2019). assertr: Assertive Programming for R Analysis
    Pipelines. R package version 2.6.
    <https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=assertr> [↩︎](#fnref:3){.footnote-backref
    role="doc-backlink"}
    :::

4.  ::: {#fn:4}
    Adam Sparks (2018). nasapower: A NASA POWER Global Meteorology,
    Surface Solar Energy and Climatology Data Client for R. Journal of
    Open Source Software, 3(30), 1035,
    <https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01035> [↩︎](#fnref:4){.footnote-backref
    role="doc-backlink"}
    :::

5.  ::: {#fn:5}
    Andy South (2017). rnaturalearth: World Map Data from Natural Earth.
    R package version 0.1.0.
    <https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rnaturalearth> [↩︎](#fnref:5){.footnote-backref
    role="doc-backlink"}
    :::

6.  ::: {#fn:6}
    rOpenSci, Brooke Anderson, Scott Chamberlain, Anna Krystalli,
    Lincoln Mullen, Karthik Ram, Noam Ross, Maëlle Salmon, Melina
    Vidoni. (2019, October 2). ropensci/dev_guide: Third release
    (Version 0.3.0). Zenodo.
    <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2553043> [↩︎](#fnref:6){.footnote-backref
    role="doc-backlink"}
    :::
:::


We want to know how
<strong>
 you
</strong>
use rOpenSci packages and resources so we can give them, their developers, and your examples more visibility. It’s valuable to both users and developers of a package to see how it has been used “in the wild”. This goes a long way to encouraging people to keep up development knowing there are others who appreciate and build on their work.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

What are Your Use Cases for rOpenSci Tools and Resources?