R for Librarians

Preface

This is a book contains guidance for getting started using R, with code and examples for addressing tasks faced by the Bibliometrics Team at the University of Southampton (UoS) Library Service.

If you want a full guide to data analysis in R check out R for Data Science

Some of the materials here are re-used from previous workshops I ran for biologists from 2019/20 called Coding Together.

If you are new to R, then the first thing to know is that R is a programming language and RStudio is program for working with R called an integrated development environment (IDE).

You can use R without installing RStudio, but you can’t work with R in RStudio by installing RStudio alone. Download R here and Download RStudio Desktop here.

If you are wondering if and/or why learning R might be useful, 1  Setting the scene should help answer those questions.