How to keep yourself updated with the latest R news?

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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?

Twitter

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.

Newsletters

Besides Twitter, I also read new blog posts and stay informed through these newsletters:

  1. R-Bloggers (daily)
  2. R Weekly (weekly)
  3. R mailing lists

The 2 first newsletters are actually blog aggregators, so collections of many many blogs. If you have your own blog, don’t hesitate to submit it to make it accessible to more people.

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.


  1. See for example this article. The package I discovered was so useful and interesting (to me), that I added a new section to the post and now use it instead of the older package.↩︎

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