How can I trust a library in R?

Question

Is there a way to see how many times a library has been downloaded in R? Or how many issues there have been. My concern is the lack of security around R libraries.

Answer 1

There is a package called riskmetric specifically for estimating the 'trustworthyness' of other packages.

If you just want the number of downloads, you can use cranlogs.

Answer 2

To check the total downloads for a package on CRAN use,

https://cranlogs.r-pkg.org/badges/grand-total/pkgname

Replace pkgname with the CRAN package name