RE: st: Use of Stata now fastest growing

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

I replied to Roland on my blog, but it's a very intriguing question so here's my response for Statalist readers. Is anyone aware of a change, perhaps in the APA Publication Manual, suggesting that people stop citing software around 2005?  Or perhaps a year or two earlier given the publication lag?

Cheers,
Bob

-------My response from blog regarding hump in Fig. 2 of http://bit.ly/10nMabo:

That's a question that has mystified me for several years. Other than SAS and SPSS, Systat was #3 during the "hump" years but it did not show that hump. I added all the packages together to see if it smoothed things out. It did not; the plot looked much like SPSS by itself, just at a higher level.

I've asked quite few people about this, including the people in charge of SPSS development, and no one is quite sure why there's such a radical shift.

One possibility for the drop off is that the recession cut government grant funding sharply. But you'd have to assume that for some reason it affected SAS and SPSS but not the other packages. That might be caused by the fact that more established researchers A) got more grants (and so more cuts) and B) being older they also used the older packages.

Another possibility is the retirement of the baby boomers. If they tended to use the packages that have been around longer, then SPSS and SAS would have been disproportionately affected.

...later I commented to another reader:

Competition from the packages shown in this set of graphs definitely cannot balance out that hump (I've plotted it to make sure) but it's possible that competition from other packages that do statistics might. MATLAB, Mathematica, RapidMiner, Weka, SPSS Modeler, SAS Enterprise Miner, Spotfire, Tableau, KXEN, and Salford's CART, TREENET, MARS, etc. must have been used in a lot of scholarly publications and many were not popular before 2005. However, in academia I don't see the classic SPSS user using any of them. Stata is the only thing I see chomping away at the SPSS marketshare in academia.



>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-
>statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of roland andersson
>Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 4:25 PM
>To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
>Subject: Re: st: Use of Stata now fastest growing
>
>How can we explain that the total number of hits for all the packages show such
>a peak in 2005? Do I understand correctly that the calculations are done on
>publications that report which software that were used? Maybe this practice is
>changing?
>
>Roland E Andersson
>
>2013/5/14 Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) <muenchen@utk.edu>:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> My latest data shows that Stata is now the fastest growing software for
>scholarly use.
>>
>> http://r4stats.com/2013/05/14/beginning-of-the-end-v2/
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Bob
>>
>> ==================================================
>>   Bob Muenchen (pronounced Min'-chen)
>>   Accredited Professional Statistician(tm)
>>   Manager, Research Computing Support
>>   Voice: (865) 974-5230
>>   Email: muenchen@utk.edu
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