Citing R and RStudio

Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.
Wilson Mizner

Even though I spend the morning in an futile effort to create a map with R, the software is great. It’s freely available, there is RStudio, which is a great integrated development environment, and yeah … it’s fun.

You can see that the developers have fun with it — the serious fun — when you look at the citation string:

citation()

You get (for example):

To cite R in publications use:

  R Core Team (2020). R: A language and environment
  for statistical computing. R Foundation for
  Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL
  https://www.R-project.org/.

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Manual{,
    title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing},
    author = {{R Core Team}},
    organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
    address = {Vienna, Austria},
    year = {2020},
    url = {https://www.R-project.org/},
  }

We have invested a lot of time and effort in creating
R, please cite it when using it for data analysis. See
also ‘citation("pkgname")’ for citing R packages.

That’s some service — How to cite it (looks like APA), the BibTeX entry (using, e.g., Zotero, it works not only for LaTeX) — yeah. And they are right — they have invested time and effort, and they have done well.

BTW, RStudio has an equivalent:

library(rstudioapi)
versionInfo()$citation

which leads to:

To cite RStudio in publications use:

  RStudio Team (2019). RStudio: Integrated Development
  for R. RStudio, Inc., Boston, MA URL
  http://www.rstudio.com/.

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Manual{,
    title = {RStudio: Integrated Development Environment for R},
    author = {{RStudio Team}},
    organization = {RStudio, Inc.},
    address = {Boston, MA},
    year = {2019},
    url = {http://www.rstudio.com/},
  }

And yeah, citing packages works as well, e.g.,

citation("tidyverse")

gives you:

  Wickham et al., (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse.
  Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686,
  https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Article{,
    title = {Welcome to the {tidyverse}},
    author = {Hadley Wickham and Mara Averick and Jennifer Bryan and Winston Chang and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Romain François and Garrett Grolemund and Alex Hayes and Lionel Henry and Jim Hester and Max Kuhn and Thomas Lin Pedersen and Evan Miller and Stephan Milton Bache and Kirill Müller and Jeroen Ooms and David Robinson and Dana Paige Seidel and Vitalie Spinu and Kohske Takahashi and Davis Vaughan and Claus Wilke and Kara Woo and Hiroaki Yutani},
    year = {2019},
    journal = {Journal of Open Source Software},
    volume = {4},
    number = {43},
    pages = {1686},
    doi = {10.21105/joss.01686},
  }

Nicely done.