Publishing and Promoting a Package

Getting Academic Credit for Your Work

Unfortunately you need to publish a paper not just a package to get credit, although times are changing!

One option is software journals: - The R Journal - Journal of Statistical Software - Journal of Computational and Graphical Statitics - Journal of Open Source Software

These are all options, and they have different formats and requirements.

The R Journal

The papers are basically a well-polished, extended vingette

worked through examples, data should be be included in the package
give examples of all functions in the package and discuss options
discuss details of implementation

pseval paper

Journal of Statistical Software

Actually has a pretty high impact factor!

More academic than The R J
Interesting or well-written vignettes are perfect
More focus on the methodology

plotROC paper

Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics

Old school stats journal

Part of the AMSTAT family
Focus is on the statistical/computational method
Having a R package is just a bonus

Journal of open source software

New kid on the block

Focus is on the software, not the paper
Short vignettes, extended descriptions
Peer-review main focus is on the package itself, quality of documentation and code structure

The other option is a case study

Write an application, practice or case study paper
Using your package for a interesting dataset or scientific problem
Submit to a regular journal in your field

Many of the epidemiology journals will gladly accept descriptions of statistical software

If all else fails

Self-publish!

usethis::use_pkgdown()

If you have a nice README.md, and vignettes as html files, it is trivial to turn it into a nice-looking webpage.

CITATION file

If you do publish, make sure users know how to cite you:

usethis::use_citation()

Then people can find the citation using

citation("packagename")

Software review

https://smartbiomed.github.io/software-review