RE: st: Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, Statistica, S-PLUS updated

["Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)" <muenchen@utk.edu>]

Hi Kit,

That's very interesting indeed! 1,407 packages on SSC alone is an impressive figure. I suspect that the growth curve of Stata packages would look similar to the one for R. Perhaps less exponential just because it has been around longer. Or perhaps more S-shaped over time. The one for R has got to slow down into an S-shape eventually.

Thanks,
Bob

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Christopher Baum [mailto:kit.baum@bc.edu]
>Sent: Friday, March 25, 2011 10:17 AM
>To: Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)
>Cc: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
>Subject: Re: st: Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, Statistica, S-PLUS updated
>
>Hi Bob,
>
>Those stats are only available monthly. The stats accessed by -ssc hot- within
>Stata are available quite a bit farther back, but they are not counts of raw
>downloads. In any case what is being counted on report.ssc.html is the download
>of individual files. Many packages (the equivalent of R packages) contain a
>number of files (all contain at least 2, but some contain many more). Thus the
>stats accessible within Stata are counts of package downloads,not file
>downloads. See my posting near the beginning of each month (except this month,
>when it was later) on SSC Activity for the top 25 package counts.
>
>I can count how many packages are on SSC (1,407 at this moment) but I do not
>know how many are on STB/SJ, UCLA, etc. In any case such counts are
>overlapping, as often a package shows up first on SSC, then appears in the SJ,
>then is updated on SSC (and possibly on SJ). So there is some amount of
>duplication between SSC and SJ/STB. In some cases packages on SSC become
>redundant for users of the latest version of Stata, as it may contain an official
>command with that functionality. But I would say the vast majority of public Stata
>packages are either in SSC and/or STB/SJ archives.
>
>Cheers
>Kit
>
>On Mar 25, 2011, at 9:52 AM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:
>
>> That's very helpful information. I've switched the URL to point to:
>> http://fmwww.bc.edu/fmrc/reports/report.ssc.html
>>
>> That link has a rich set of information regarding downloads: hourly, daily,
>weekly.  Is yearly download data available? If it is, it would make a great addition
>to the paper.
>>
>> Are there counts of the total packages there now? By year?
>>
>> Does anyone know what percent of the total of the main repositories are at
>SSC? To find equivalent info for R I chose only the biggest, CRAN, and ran a
>program to count the unique package names (2,849 on 3/25). I then selected all 9
>major repositories and ran it again (4,338). So while yearly total number of R
>packages is known only for CRAN, we can estimate that the growth curve shown
>in Figure 9 (http://r4stats.com/popularity) is 66% of the total. Individuals still
>have their own sets, but probably a relatively small number. I would *love* to
>have similar data for Stata!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Bob
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-
>>> statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Christopher Baum
>>> Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2011 1:27 PM
>>> To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
>>> Subject: re: Re: st: Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, Statistica,
>>> S-PLUS updated
>>>
>>> <>
>>> Nick Cox pointed out, in re "Popularity",
>>>
>>> In this document there is a repeated misunderstanding. Downloads from
>>> SSC (repec), as members of this list will generally know, are only
>>> one way of downloading user-written packages for Stata. Indeed
>>> another main way, through the Stata Journal and Stata Technical
>>> Bulletin websites, predates SSC. Data for such downloads are
>>> proprietary to StataCorp. It's my guess that they are easily the same order of
>magnitude as SSC downloads.
>>>
>>>
>>> Actually, it is worse than that. The Muenchen document states
>>>
>>> Similar figures for downloads of Stata add-ons (not Stata itself) are
>>> available at
>>> http://logec.repec.org/scripts/itemstat.pf?type=redif-software.  However,
>both R and Stata have other significant repositories that do not provide such
>counts.
>>>
>>> This is quite misleading. The LogEc count referred to by that URL is
>>> the count of .ado, .hlp, .sthlp, .mlib files downloaded from the SSC
>>> Archive via web browser links. On each web browser page, users are
>>> strongly encouraged NOT to download software this way (and that it
>>> will probably fail if they are Windows users). Nevertheless, a
>>> nontrivial number do so; this statistic might be termed the 'bozo
>>> count'. But those counts are a serious underestimate of download
>>> activity from the SSC Archive, as the recommended technique to
>>> perform these downloads is from within Stata using the -ssc- command,
>>> and a much larger number of Stata users download using this
>>> recommendation. Such downloads are not tracked by RePEc services, but
>>> they are tracked by the web server which satisfies Stata's requests.
>>> So the URL above should be removed from the "Popularity" document. A
>>> URL which gives a snapshot of download activity over a recent month
>>> is
>>>
>>> http://fmwww.bc.edu/fmrc/reports/report.ssc.html
>>>
>>> Much more readable stats are available from within Stata, using -ssc
>>> hot-, but that of course requires that you use Stata.
>>>
>>> Nick's point -- that downloads of user-written software involve the
>>> SJ/STB Archive, the UCLA archive and various users' sites -- is of course well
>taken.
>>>
>>> Kit
>>>
>>> Kit Baum   |   Boston College Economics and DIW Berlin   |
>>> http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
>>> An Introduction to Stata Programming   |   http://www.stata-
>>> press.com/books/isp.html
>>> An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata   |   http://www.stata-
>>> press.com/books/imeus.html
>>>
>>>
>>> *
>>> *   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/
>>
>>
>
>
>Research Papers in Economics (RePEc)
>http://repec.org
>
>
>
>



*
*   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/