Gest blog post.

Vozag downloaded CRAN data from the R project to understand the top projects & which ones had the most discussions. Given below is a list of the top 20 packages downloaded in a single day. The full list of the top 100 most downloaded R packages is here.

We also decided to then analyze Stack Overflow data to understand most discussed packages and analyze the one with the most questions & unanswered questions.

GGPlot was ranked first with the most questions at ~7200 questions followed by Data table (2135), Plyr (1213) & Knitr (1136). Other packages had less than 1000 questions each. We also looked at the unanswered questions. The packages with the highest percentage of unanswered packages were Knitr, Lattice and iGraph at 24.2%, 23.5% and 19.8% respectively. 

Comparing the top downloaded packages with the most discussed packages shows little correlations between them. For Instance, GGplot has the most questions asked & is the second highest downloaded package but “Data.Table” package (the second highest ranked R package for questions asked) is not even in the top 100 packages downloaded. Knitr is another example which is in the top 5 questions asked, but is 27^th ranked in downloaded packages.

So- does the R community need to focus on packages that have the highest questions to resolve their issues rather than the ones with the most downloads?

===

Guest Post by Vozag