As said, SPSS is easier to learn than R. But SPSS, SAS and Stata come with major downsides when comparing it with R:
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R is highly modular.
-The official R network (CRAN) features more than 16,000 packages at the time of writing, our AMR
package being one of them. All these packages were peer-reviewed before publication. Aside from this official channel, there are also developers who choose not to submit to CRAN, but rather keep it on their own public repository, like GitHub. So there may even be a lot more than 14,000 packages out there.
+The official R network (CRAN) features more than 16,000 packages at the time of writing, our AMR
package being one of them. All these packages were peer-reviewed before publication. Aside from this official channel, there are also developers who choose not to submit to CRAN, but rather keep it on their own public repository, like GitHub. So there may even be a lot more than 14,000 packages out there.
Bottom line is, you can really extend it yourself or ask somebody to do this for you. Take for example our AMR
package. Among other things, it adds reliable reference data to R to help you with the data cleaning and analysis. SPSS, SAS and Stata will never know what a valid MIC value is or what the Gram stain of E. coli is. Or that all species of Klebiella are resistant to amoxicillin and that Floxapen® is a trade name of flucloxacillin. These facts and properties are often needed to clean existing data, which would be very inconvenient in a software package without reliable reference data. See below for a demonstration.
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@@ -221,27 +219,27 @@
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R can be easily automated.
-Over the last years, R Markdown has really made an interesting development. With R Markdown, you can very easily produce reports, whether the format has to be Word, PowerPoint, a website, a PDF document or just the raw data to Excel. It even allows the use of a reference file containing the layout style (e.g. fonts and colours) of your organisation. I use this a lot to generate weekly and monthly reports automatically. Just write the code once and enjoy the automatically updated reports at any interval you like.
-For an even more professional environment, you could create Shiny apps: live manipulation of data using a custom made website. The webdesign knowledge needed (JavaScript, CSS, HTML) is almost zero.
+Over the last years, R Markdown has really made an interesting development. With R Markdown, you can very easily produce reports, whether the format has to be Word, PowerPoint, a website, a PDF document or just the raw data to Excel. It even allows the use of a reference file containing the layout style (e.g. fonts and colours) of your organisation. I use this a lot to generate weekly and monthly reports automatically. Just write the code once and enjoy the automatically updated reports at any interval you like.
+For an even more professional environment, you could create Shiny apps: live manipulation of data using a custom made website. The webdesign knowledge needed (JavaScript, CSS, HTML) is almost zero.
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R has a huge community.
-Many R users just ask questions on websites like StackOverflow.com, the largest online community for programmers. At the time of writing, 415,751 R-related questions have already been asked on this platform (that covers questions and answers for any programming language). In my own experience, most questions are answered within a couple of minutes.
+Many R users just ask questions on websites like StackOverflow.com, the largest online community for programmers. At the time of writing, 427,872 R-related questions have already been asked on this platform (that covers questions and answers for any programming language). In my own experience, most questions are answered within a couple of minutes.
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R understands any data type, including SPSS/SAS/Stata.
-And that’s not vice versa I’m afraid. You can import data from any source into R. For example from SPSS, SAS and Stata (link), from Minitab, Epi Info and EpiData (link), from Excel (link), from flat files like CSV, TXT or TSV (link), or directly from databases and datawarehouses from anywhere on the world (link). You can even scrape websites to download tables that are live on the internet (link) or get the results of an API call and transform it into data in only one command (link).
+And that’s not vice versa I’m afraid. You can import data from any source into R. For example from SPSS, SAS and Stata (link), from Minitab, Epi Info and EpiData (link), from Excel (link), from flat files like CSV, TXT or TSV (link), or directly from databases and datawarehouses from anywhere on the world (link). You can even scrape websites to download tables that are live on the internet (link) or get the results of an API call and transform it into data in only one command (link).
And the best part - you can export from R to most data formats as well. So you can import an SPSS file, do your analysis neatly in R and export the resulting tables to Excel files for sharing.
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R is completely free and open-source.
-No strings attached. It was created and is being maintained by volunteers who believe that (data) science should be open and publicly available to everybody. SPSS, SAS and Stata are quite expensive. IBM SPSS Staticstics only comes with subscriptions nowadays, varying between USD 1,300 and USD 8,500 per user per year. SAS Analytics Pro costs around USD 10,000 per computer. Stata also has a business model with subscription fees, varying between USD 600 and USD 2,800 per computer per year, but lower prices come with a limitation of the number of variables you can work with. And still they do not offer the above benefits of R.
+No strings attached. It was created and is being maintained by volunteers who believe that (data) science should be open and publicly available to everybody. SPSS, SAS and Stata are quite expensive. IBM SPSS Staticstics only comes with subscriptions nowadays, varying between USD 1,300 and USD 8,500 per user per year. SAS Analytics Pro costs around USD 10,000 per computer. Stata also has a business model with subscription fees, varying between USD 600 and USD 2,800 per computer per year, but lower prices come with a limitation of the number of variables you can work with. And still they do not offer the above benefits of R.
If you are working at a midsized or small company, you can save it tens of thousands of dollars by using R instead of e.g. SPSS - gaining even more functions and flexibility. And all R enthousiasts can do as much PR as they want (like I do here), because nobody is officially associated with or affiliated by R. It is really free.
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R is (nowadays) the preferred analysis software in academic papers.
-At present, R is among the world most powerful statistical languages, and it is generally very popular in science (Bollmann et al., 2017). For all the above reasons, the number of references to R as an analysis method in academic papers is rising continuously and has even surpassed SPSS for academic use (Muenchen, 2014).
-I believe that the thing with SPSS is, that it has always had a great user interface which is very easy to learn and use. Back when they developed it, they had very little competition, let alone from R. R didn’t even had a professional user interface until the last decade (called RStudio, see below). How people used R between the nineties and 2010 is almost completely incomparable to how R is being used now. The language itself has been restyled completely by volunteers who are dedicated professionals in the field of data science. SPSS was great when there was nothing else that could compete. But now in 2021, I don’t see any reason why SPSS would be of any better use than R.
+At present, R is among the world most powerful statistical languages, and it is generally very popular in science (Bollmann et al., 2017). For all the above reasons, the number of references to R as an analysis method in academic papers is rising continuously and has even surpassed SPSS for academic use (Muenchen, 2014).
+I believe that the thing with SPSS is, that it has always had a great user interface which is very easy to learn and use. Back when they developed it, they had very little competition, let alone from R. R didn’t even had a professional user interface until the last decade (called RStudio, see below). How people used R between the nineties and 2010 is almost completely incomparable to how R is being used now. The language itself has been restyled completely by volunteers who are dedicated professionals in the field of data science. SPSS was great when there was nothing else that could compete. But now in 2021, I don’t see any reason why SPSS would be of any better use than R.