st: What is Popularity? (with respect to R, SAS, SPSS, Stata...)

["Michael N. Mitchell" <Michael.Norman.Mitchell@gmail.com>]

Dear Bob

  I think this is a very interesting, unique, and challenging endeavor. I think this is a 
classic issue of having a latent construct that we want to measure (popularity) and some 
easy measures lying around. So far, I have not seen a discussion of how we would define 
this latent variable of "popularity" of a statistical package. In terms of defining 
"popularity" some random thoughts are...

  1. Number of "users" (but of course there are different kinds of "users").
  2. Number of copies "in use" (but of course there are different kinds of use, 
occasional vs. vs. daily).
  3. Amount of use (people hours, publications completed).
  4. Preferred utilization (I must use X, but I would prefer to use Y).
  5. Quality ratings.

  I think that it would be useful to solicit discussion of how people would define 
"popularity" with respect to statistical packages. Then, each of the available measures 
could be assessed to the degree it reflects the underlying unmeasured idea of "popularity".

Best regards,

Michael N. Mitchell
Data Management Using Stata      - http://www.stata.com/bookstore/dmus.html
A Visual Guide to Stata Graphics - http://www.stata.com/bookstore/vgsg.html
Stata tidbit of the week         - http://www.MichaelNormanMitchell.com



On 2010-06-28 6.52 AM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:
> Greeting Listserv Readers,
>
> At http://r4stats.com/popularity I have added plots, data, and/or
> discussion of:
>
> 1. Scholarly impact of each package across the years
> 2. The number of subscribers to some of the listservs
> 3. How popular each package is among Google searches across the years
> 4. Survey results from a Rexer Analytics poll
> 5. Survey results from a KDnuggests poll
> 6. A rudimentary analysis of the software skills that employers are
> seeking
>
> Thanks very much to all the folks who helped on this project including:
> John Fox, Marc Schwartz, Duncan Murdoch, Martin Weiss, John (Jiangtang)
> HU, Andre Wielki, Kjetil Halvorsen, Dario Solari, Joris Meys, Keo
> Ormsby, Karl Rexer, and Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro.
>
> If anyone can think of other angles, please let me know.
>
> Cheers,
> Bob
>
> =========================================================
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>    Research Computing Support
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