Dear Charilaos, It's very difficult to give definitive answers to the questions that you pose because we don't have any good data (at least as far as I know) about how widely R is used. I recall a claim, I think on the r-help list, that R is now second to SAS in use world-wide, but I'm not sure how one would establish that. I do, however, have anecdotal evidence about R use that may be of some help, and perhaps others can contribute their impressions, especially if they differ from mine.
I think that it's fair to say that the S language is more or less the standard among statisticians, and that R has now far surpassed S-PLUS in use. For rough evidence one could look, for example, to the relative levels of activity on the r-help and s-news email lists. Among social scientists the picture is not as clear. My impression is that SPSS is used very widely for low-levels methods courses taught to undergraduates, and not very extensively in the best social-science graduate programmes. I would expect that, at present, Stata use in social-science graduate programmes exceeds R, and that SAS and R would also be used fairly widely. In my opinion, these are the only reasonable choices -- I don't think that SPSS is sufficiently capable to compete with R, Stata, or SAS. There are, for example, several different packages used at the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods for Social Research, but several relatively advanced courses now use R. Likewise, the Oxford Spring School, hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford, has mostly employed R and Stata. Of course, my own preference is for R. Regards, John -------------------------------- John Fox Department of Sociology McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario Canada L8S 4M4 905-525-9140x23604 http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox -------------------------------- > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Charilaos Skiadas > Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 11:18 AM > To: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch > Subject: Re: [R] Making a case for using R in Academia > > As a addendum to all this, this is one of the responses I got > from one of my colleagues: > > "The problem with R is that our students in many social science > fields, are expected to know SPSS when they go to graduate school. > Not having a background in SPSS would put these students at a > disadvantage." > > Is this really the case? Does anyone have any such statistics? > > Charilaos Skiadas > Department of Mathematics > Hanover College > P.O.Box 108 > Hanover, IN 47243 > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.