How to keep yourself updated with the latest R news?
Introduction
At the end of one of the training sessions I gave on R, a student asked me the following question:
How do you keep yourself updated with the latest R news?
It is true that R, being open source (meaning that everyone can contribute), is evolving rapidly. This means that even if I am using R for several years and on a daily basis, I like to stay informed in order to stay up to date with the program and the latest coding practices.
In fact, I learn about new packages, new functions and new features almost everyday. Most of them are not particularly useful for my research or my teaching tasks, but sometimes I discover such a nice package or function that I replace my code with new one.1
The training was an advanced one, so the student had a good knowledge of R and was not looking for more tutorials or courses. She was interested in knowing where to look for updates about current and new R packages and functions.
After sharing my sources with all students following the training, I thought it would be useful to others. In this article, I share my sources—from where I get the latest R updates and news.
The sources are divided into two main categories: Twitter and newsletters.
How do I keep track?
To be honest, I mostly use Twitter to keep up to date with R news.
Twitter allows me to follow discussions about statistical methods or approaches, and to keep me informed about publications of new blog posts.
What I particularly like with Twitter is that there is a mix between:
- short messages about new functions or packages (most of the time with an illustration or an example), and
- announcements of new blog posts that cover specific subjects in details.
For this, I follow people (researchers, professors, bloggers, statisticians, data scientists, etc.) that are working in my domains of interest. For instance, I am mostly interested in the application of statistics in R, data science, biostatistics and data visualization. I thus follow accounts which regularly post about these topics. I also avoid following accounts that cover topics I am not interested in, so that my Twitter feed really shows information I am most likely to be interested in.
Below, you will see a list of some of the accounts I follow, classified by themes. Of course, this is a non-exhaustive list! There are plenty of very inspiring and intelligent people that are not in the list, simply because I cannot afford to put them all.
If you follow people that post regularly about the themes covered below, feel free to add them in the comments. I am always looking for new inspiring accounts to follow.
Note that the accounts are displayed in alphabetical order and the table is searchable.
You will also find many news when exploring #rstats on Twitter.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading.
I hope this article will help you to keep track of great blogs, tutorials and other resources about R. Feel free to follow me on Twitter (@statsandr), where I tweet my new articles and retweet everything I find interesting or worth mentioning.
As always, if you have a question or a suggestion related to the topic covered in this article, please add it as a comment so other readers can benefit from the discussion.
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