Six Reasons to Consider Using R in Psychological Research
Tyson S. Barrett · 2019
The R Statistical Environment is becoming increasingly accessible to non-statistician researchers. This provides an opportunity for many researchers in psychology to consider adopting R in their work. Herein is presented six reasons for why R should not be overlooked by researchers in psychology: 1) R is free and open-source; 2) R has many packages built for common descriptive and statistical analyses in the psychological sciences; 3) the R community is supportive and have freely provided many useful resources, for beginners and advanced users alike; 4) R is becoming increasingly popular in psychology already, making it easier to collaborate using the software; 5) analyses in R can be highly reproducible with features like R Markdown and knitr, simplifying the process to provide open science; and 6) the R language has improved in diverse ways, making common data wrangling tasks fast, dependable, and highly replicable. These reasons are presented with their corresponding limitations.