Article about plyr published in JSS, and the citation was added to the new plyr (version 1.5)

The plyr package (by Hadley Wickham) is one of the few R packages for which I can claim to have used for all of my statistical projects. So whenever a new version of plyr comes out I tend to be excited about it (as was when version 1.2 came out with support for parallel processing)

So it is no surprise that the new release of plyr 1.5 got me curious. While going through the news file with the new features and bug fixes, I noticed how (quietly) Hadley has also released (6 days ago) another version of plyr prior to 1.5 which was numbered 1.4.1. That version included only one more function, but a very important one – a new citation reference for when using the plyr package. Here is how to use it:

install.packages("plyr") # so to upgrade to the latest release
citation("plyr")

The output gives both a simple text version as well as a BibTeX entry for LaTeX users. Here it is (notice the download link for yourself to read):

To cite plyr in publications use:
Hadley Wickham (2011). The Split-Apply-Combine Strategy for Data
Analysis. Journal of Statistical Software, 40(1), 1-29. URL
http://www.jstatsoft.org/v40/i01/.

I hope to see more R contributers and users will make use of the ?citation() function in the future.