Overview

The R Journal is the peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal, published by The R Foundation. It features short to medium length articles (up to 20 pages) covering topics of interest to users and developers of R. For example, description and implementation details of R packages, surveys or reviews of R software related to a particular area, applications of R software or descriptions of teaching resources related to R.

The R Journal reaches a wide audience and has a thorough review process. It has a generally increasing SJR impact factor. Papers are expected to be concise, clearly written, not too technical, clearly related to R, and follow reproducible practices. Additional technical details and examples could be included as supplementary material. Authors of refereed articles should take care to:

• put their contribution in context, in particular discuss related R functions or packages;
• explain the motivation for their contribution;
• provide code to reproduce the material in the paper.

Article types

The R Journal accepts a variety of article topics including:

• Packages: Details of contributed R packages that are available on CRAN or Bioconductor, that go beyond a package vignette. This includes providing the broader context, implementation details, applications or examples of use, with the purpose being to make the work relevant to a wider readership than only the package users. The paper might explain the novelty in implementation and use of R, introduce new data structures or general architectures that could be re-usable for other R projects. Note that both the paper and the code will be reviewed.
• Reviews and proposals: surveying and discussing challenges and opportunities of potential importance for the broader R community, including proposals and proof-of-concept implementations.
• Comparisons and benchmarking: of implementations in base-R and contributed packages with each other, and where relevant with implementations in other software systems.
• Applications: demonstrating how new or existing techniques can be applied in an area of current interest using R, providing a fresh view of such analyses in R that is of benefit beyond the specific application.
• Special issue articles: papers associated with a conference like R Medicine, or possibly a collection of papers on a particular topic of interest.

History

The R Journal was established in 2009, superseding the R News. For historical purposes it also a news section, that includes items from R Core, updates from CRAN and Bioconductor, foRwards activities and conference reports.

R Journal article summaries, for the last four years

The R Journal receives a large number of submissions, currently over 200 a year, and processing times and especially review times are highly variable. The summaries below shows that for published articles, the time from first submission to accept averages at under a year. Just a very small number of 2021 submissions await a final decision, and even for 2022 submissions, the majority of articles have received an accept/reject decision.

For published articles in the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, the boxplots show time from submission to accept by year of publication. Median number of days to accept is under a year. The barchart on the right refers to articles submitted in the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and reports the status as rejected, in progress or accepted/published. Papers labelled ‘in progress’ are under review or awaiting revisions.

Editorial board

Editor-in-Chief

Mark van der Loo, Statistics Netherlands and University of Leiden, The Netherlands r-journal@r-project.org

Executive editors

• Simon Urbanek, The University of Auckland, New Zealand
• Rob Hyndman, Monash University, Australia
• Emi Tanaka, Australian National University, Australia

Associate editors

• Rafael de Andrade Moral, Maynooth University, Ireland
• Vincent Arel-Bundock, University of Montreal, Canada
• Rasmus Bååth, Lund University, Sweden
• Przemek Biecek, University of Warsaw, Poland
• Chris Brunsdon, Maynooth University, Ireland
• Kevin Burke, University of Limerick, Ireland
• Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Duke University, USA
• Xiaoyue Cheng, University of Nebraska, Omaha, USA
• Katarina Domijan, Maynooth University, Ireland
• Isabella Gollini, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Michael Kane, Yale University, USA
• Adam Loy, Carleton College, USA
• Nicholas Tierney, Telethon Kids, Australia
• Susan Vanderplas, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
• Emily Zabor, The Cleveland Clinic and Tassig Cancer Institute, USA
• Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, Wake Forest University, USA
• Yanfei Kang, Beihang University, China
• Ursula Laa, BOKU Vienna, Austria
• Matthias Templ, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Switzerland
• Jouni Helske, University of Turku, Finland
• Christoph Sax, Cynkra, Switzerland
• Thomas Fung, Macquarie University, Australia
• Thiyanga Talagala, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka
• Xiaoqian Wang, Monash University, Australia
• Ivan Svetunkov, Lancaster University, UK
• Wenjie Wang, Eli Lilly and Company, USA

Editorial advisory board

• Henrik Bengtssen, University of California, San Francisco, USA
• Gabriela de Quiroz, Chief Data Scientist, IBM, USA
• Michael Kane, Yale University, USA
• Rebecca Killick, Lancaster University, UK

Governance

The R Journal is run under the auspices of the R Foundation, and editors of the Journal are appointed by the Foundation board.

Past Editors-in-Chief

Vince Carey (2009), Peter Dalgaard (2010), Heather Turner (2011), Martyn Plummer (2012), Hadley Wickham (2013), Deepayan Sarkar (2014), Bettina Grün (2015), Michael Lawrence (2016), Roger Bivand (2017), John Verzani (2018), Norman Matloff (2019), Michael Kane (2020), Dianne Cook (2021), Catherine Hurley (2022), Simon Urbanek (2023)

Past Associate Editors

• Romain Lesur, INSEE, France (2024)
• Earo Wang (2020-2022)
• Beth Atkinson (2020-2022)
• Kieran Healy (2021-2022)
• Elizabeth Sweeney (2021-2023)
• Louis Aslett (2021-2023)
• Przemek Biecek (2021-2023)
• Priyanga Dilini Talagala (2021-2023)
• Simone Blomberg (2021-2022)
• Mark van der Loo (2021-2022)
• Emi Tanaka (2022-2023)