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

[Neil Shephard <nshephard@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 6:22 PM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)
<muenchen@utk.edu> wrote:
> I've been off to Google Scholar and have been quickly reminded why I
> gave up previously. Here are some search results for SAS constrained
> only by the year of publication==2009:
>
> SAS - 7,510 but most of these are way off base. Not sure why we got such
> different results.
>
> "SAS" - 730 These are much better as the quotes eliminate spaces between
> the letters. But included are all the papers on:
>
> Sythetic Aperture Sonar
> Simulating an Automated System
> Swarm AlgorithS
> Semi-Active Suspensions
> San Andreas System
> Supervisory Attentional Systems
> Semi-Algebraic Systems...
>
> "SAS Institute" - 221, many by people listing SAS Institute as their
> employer!

Another way to come at this is to take the title of the citation that
you are supposed to use when citing R/Stata/SPSS/SAS etc. and plug it
into Google and see how many times it is reported as being cited.

For example the official way of citing R is detailed in the FAQ
(http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Citing-R) as being...

@Manual{,
       title        = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical
                       Computing},
       author       = {{R Development Core Team}},
       organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
       address      = {Vienna, Austria},
       year         = 2010,
       note         = {{ISBN} 3-900051-07-0},
       url          = {http://www.R-project.org}
     }

Plug the title into scholar and it tells you the number of times the
title is cited (see
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q="R%3A+A+Language+and+Environment+for+Statistical+Computing"&hl=en
).  The problem is that the manual is "published" each year or so, so
there are multiple versions of the same paper cited at different
points of time that relate to different versions of R.

For Stata the official citation is detailed in the FAQ at
http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/cite.html The results are less
useful in this instance and you have to put double quotes around the
main string, and because this isn't an actual paper itself that has
been cited you'd have to look at the number of matched hits, which for
version 11 is 35 (see
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=%22Stata+Statistical+Software%3A+Release+11%22&btnG=Search
whilst version 10 returns 633 hits
http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q="Stata+Statistical+Software%3A+Release+10"&btnG=Search)

I'm sure you can do similar with SAS/SPSS/WinBugs/JAGS/etc.

Neil

-- 
"... no scientific worker has a fixed level of significance at which
from year to year, and in all circumstances, he rejects hypotheses; he
rather gives his mind to each particular case in the light of his
evidence and his ideas." - Sir Ronald A. Fisher (1956)

Email - nshephard@gmail.com
Website - http://slack.ser.man.ac.uk/
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