R "stats" citation for a scientific paper

Question

I analyzed my data using R package ‘stats’ (version 2.15.3). A reviewer asked me the right citation of this package and not only the common

R Core Team (2012). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0, URL http://www.R-project.org/

Anyone know where i can find a valid citation to insert in my paper? Thanks

Answer 1

The reviewer is wrong:

 citation("stats")  The ‘stats’ package is part of R.  To cite R in publications use:    R Core Team (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R   Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0, URL   http://www.R-project.org/.  A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is    @Manual{,     title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing},     author = {{R Core Team}},     organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},     address = {Vienna, Austria},     year = {2013},     note = {{ISBN} 3-900051-07-0},     url = {http://www.R-project.org/},   }  We have invested a lot of time and effort in creating R, please cite it when using it for data analysis. See also ‘citation("pkgname")’ for citing R packages. 

Answer 2

As hrbrmstr pointed out, a function to create a list of references of only loaded packages would come in handy. As he only showed us an example and not the function, I wrote one myself which I use very often in scientific analyses and papers (sometimes combined with R Markdown).

citations <- function(includeURL = TRUE, includeRStudio = TRUE) {     if(includeRStudio == TRUE) {         ref.rstudio <- RStudio.Version()$citation         if(includeURL == FALSE) {             ref.rstudio$url <- NULL;         }         print(ref.rstudio, style = 'text')         cat('\n')     }      cit.list <- c('base', names(sessionInfo()$otherPkgs))     for(i in 1:length(cit.list)) {         ref <- citation(cit.list[i])         if(includeURL == FALSE) {             ref$url <- NULL;         }         print(ref, style = 'text')         cat('\n')     } } 

So, for example, after running

library(readr) library(dplyr) library(ggplot2) library(knitr) 

the function citations() will print:

RStudio Team (2016). RStudio: Integrated Development Environment for R. RStudio, Inc., Boston, MA. http://www.rstudio.com.

R Core Team (2017). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org.

Xie Y (2016). knitr: A General-Purpose Package for Dynamic Report Generation in R. R package version 1.15.1, http://yihui.name/knitr.

Xie Y (2015). Dynamic Documents with R and knitr, 2nd edition. Chapman and Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, Florida. ISBN 978-1498716963, http://yihui.name/knitr.

Xie Y (2014). “knitr: A Comprehensive Tool for Reproducible Research in R.” In Stodden V, Leisch F and Peng RD (eds.), Implementing Reproducible Computational Research. Chapman and Hall/CRC. ISBN 978-1466561595, http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466561595.

Wickham H (2009). ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Springer-Verlag New York. ISBN 978-0-387-98140-6, http://ggplot2.org.

Wickham H and Francois R (2016). dplyr: A Grammar of Data Manipulation. R package version 0.5.0, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dplyr.

Wickham H, Hester J and Francois R (2016). readr: Read Tabular Data. R package version 1.0.0, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readr.