Re: st: Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata...

[Ronan Conroy <rconroy@rcsi.ie>]

On 20 Meith 2010, at 14:31, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:

> I've been fiddling around with various ways to estimate the popularity
> of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Minitab, Statistica, Systat, BMDP, S- 
> PLUS,
> R-PLUS and Revolution R. It's not an easy task. You can see what I've
> come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure people
> will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me  
> know
> what you think

The extent to which user search the web is not perhaps a measure of  
popularity but one of frustration! A popular package is perhaps not  
one that generates a lot of internet traffic, but one that gets your  
work published.

(Bear in mind that Stata's own web search capabilities, which allow  
users to conduct focussed searches for Stata materials, do not appear  
in your metrics.)

My own test of popularity is to check which statistical packages are  
used in the research articles I read and review. This isn't a  
scientific exercise, and I certainly don't keep count. Rather, I am  
curious to know what packages are used, and if there is a trend for  
particular packages to be used in particular areas of research (such  
as the popularity of Prism among the lab bench people, SAS in pharma  
and Stata among people who analyse clustered data).

Since the beginning of the year I have found myself checking the  
Lancet each week (you get a couple of months complementary  
subscription for reviewing each paper). Stata has figured in about  
half the papers, followed by SAS and SPSS in about equal proportions  
(a number of papers use two packages, typically Stata plus SPSS -  
which I take to mean that one of the investigators used SPSS and the  
statistician did the hard bits in Stata). R and Statview have both  
appeared once, to my knowledge.





Ronan Conroy
=================================

rconroy@rcsi.ie
Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
Epidemiology Department,
Beaux Lane House, Dublin 2, Ireland
+353 (0)1 402 2431
+353 (0)87 799 97 95
+353 (0)1 402 2764 (Fax - remember them?)
http://rcsi.academia.edu/RonanConroy

P    Before printing, think about the environment




*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/