Abbreviated title (ISO 4) R J. Language English Publication history 2009–Present | Discipline Statistical computing Edited by Michael Lawrence | |
Publisher The R Foundation (Austria) | ||
The R Journal is an online, open-access, refereed journal published by The R Foundation since 2009. The journal publishes research articles in statistical computing that are of interest to users of the R programming language. The journal is entirely free: it does not charge authors for publication nor are there fees for subscription. The journal includes a News and Notes section that supersedes the R News newsletter, which was published from 2001 to 2008.
The journal serves a dual role as a research journal in statistical computing and as the official newsletter of the R Project. It publishes regular news updates about The R Foundation, the CRAN repository system and the Bioconductor project. It also published articles fore-shadowing new development directions for R.
The R Journal publishes short to medium length research articles. Articles may describe innovations in the R system itself, new R software packages or statistical computing theory implemented in R. Articles in The R Journal are often the primary references for the associated packages, for example for the core grid graphics packages or for parallel processing. The journal also publishes articles on best-practice and innovation in modelling, for example in multivariate statistics or multi-level modelling. A feature of the journal is the inclusion in articles of complete code by which readers can reproduce results and examples.
The journal is indexed in the ISI Web of Knowledge. Despite including many non-citable news articles, it had a 2014 impact factor of 1.038 and a 5-year IF of 1.455. In this regard, it is ranked 5th out of 9 journals in computational statistics. Google Scholar Metrics give the R Journal an h5-index of 15 and an h5-median of 27.
The current editor in chief is Michael Lawrence. Past editors-in-chief were Vince Carey (2009), Peter Dalgaard (2010), Heather Turner (2011), Martyn Plummer (2012), Hadley Wickham (2013), Deepayan Sarkar (2014) and Bettina Grün (2015). Each editor in chief serves for one year and two issues.