citation {utils}

R Documentation

Citing R and R Packages in Publications

Description

How to cite R and R packages in publications.

Usage

citation(package = "base", lib.loc = NULL)
## S3 method for class 'citation'
toBibtex(object, ...)
## S3 method for class 'citationList'
toBibtex(object, ...)

Arguments

package	a character string with the name of a single package. An error occurs if more than one package name is given.
lib.loc	a character vector with path names of R libraries, or NULL. The default value of NULL corresponds to all libraries currently known. If the default is used, the loaded packages are searched before the libraries.
object	return object of citation.
...	currently not used.

Details

The R core development team and the very active community of package authors have invested a lot of time and effort in creating R as it is today. Please give credit where credit is due and cite R and R packages when you use them for data analysis.

Execute function citation() for information on how to cite the base R system in publications. If the name of a non-base package is given, the function either returns the information contained in the CITATION file of the package or auto-generates citation information. In the latter case the package ‘DESCRIPTION’ file is parsed, the resulting citation object may be arbitrarily bad, but is quite useful (at least as a starting point) in most cases.

If only one reference is given, the print method shows both a text version and a BibTeX entry for it, if a package has more than one reference then only the text versions are shown. The BibTeX versions can be obtained using function toBibtex (see the examples below).

Value

An object of class "citationList".

See Also

citEntry

Examples

## the basic R reference
citation()

## references for a package -- might not have these installed
if(nchar(system.file(package="lattice"))) citation("lattice")
if(nchar(system.file(package="foreign"))) citation("foreign")

## extract the bibtex entry from the return value
x <- citation()
toBibtex(x)

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