sos: Searching Help Pages of R Packages
Venue
The R Journal, vol. 1/2 (2009), pp. 56-59
Publication Year
2009
Authors
Spencer Graves, Sundar Dorai-Raj, Romain Francois
BibTeX
Abstract
The sos package provides a means to quickly and flexibly search the help pages of
contributed packages, finding functions and datasets in seconds or minutes that
could not be found in hours or days by any other means we know. Its findFn function
accesses Jonathan Baron's R Site Search database and returns the matches in a data
frame of class "findFn", which can be further manipulated by other sos functions to
produce, for example, an Excel file that starts with a summary sheet that makes it
relatively easy to prioritize alternative packages for further study. As such, it
provides a very powerful way to do a literature search for functions and packages
relevant to a particular topic of interest and could become virtually mandatory for
authors of new packages or papers in publications such as The R Journal and the
Journal of Statistical Software.
