A world map of R user activity

R easily has more than two million users around the world, but where is R activity the most concentrated? That's the question that the team of R users at Rapporter seeks to answer, by combining data about locations of R Foundation members, package authors, package downloaders, and user group members into a single, country-wide "R usage score". Those R user scores are then adjusted for population and presented on the map below: red represents the least R activity, and blue the most. (Click the map to go to the interactive version on the Rapporter website.)

On a per-capita basis, the country with the most R activity is not what you might expect: New Zealand, the birthplace of R, ranks #2. Here are the top 10 countries:

1. Switzerland
2. New Zealand (birthplace of R)
3. Austria (home of the R Foundation)
4. Ireland
5. United States Minor Outlying Islands*
6. United States
7. Australia
8. Singapore
9. Denmark
10. United Kingdom
11. Canada

From the source data it looks like "United States Minor Outlying Islands" is, well, an outlier with population 316 but as much CRAN usage as the entire USA, and so it should probably be excluded from the list. So welcome to the top 10, Canada! Check out the interactive map at the link below, and you can read a little about the data collection methodology (with R code) in this blog post.

Rapporter: R activity around the world

Comments

[Francois Botha]

Instead of per capita, it would be interesting to see this as per graduate of a tertiary institution.

[Dai ZJ]

Pretty good! Except I can't zoom into Singapore where I happen to live!

[George D]

I think CRAN package downloads are the most important metric, but it's an interesting exercise. There's a lot of the world that currently isn't using R in any meaningful way - I expect its use in international scientific disciplines to change that over time.