Christopher Gandrud
(간드루드 크리스토파)

A big problem in reproducible research is that software changes. The code you used to do a piece of research may depend on a specific version of software that has since been changed. This is an annoying problem in R because install.packages only installs the most recent version of a package. It can be tedious to collect the old versions. On Toby Dylan Hocking 's suggestion, I added tools to the repmis package so that you can install, load, and cite specific R package versions. It should work for any package version that is stored on the CRAN archive ( http://cran.r-project.org ). To only install old package versions use the new repmis command InstallOldPackages . For example: # Install old versions of the e1071 and gtools packages. # Create vectors of the package names and versions to install # Note the names and version numbers must be in the same order Names &lt- c("e1071", "gtools") Vers &lt- c("1.6", "2.6.1") # Install...

I've started to put together an R package called repmis . It has miscellaneous tools for reproducible research with R. The idea behind the package is to collate commands that simplify some of the common R code used within knitr -type reproducible research papers. It's still very much in the early stages of development and has two commands: LoadandCite : a command to load all of the R packages used in a paper and create a BibTeX file containing citation information for them. It can also install the packages if they are on CRAN . source_GitHubData : a command for downloading plain-text formatted data stored on GitHub or at any other secure (https) URL. I've written about why you might want to use source_GitHubData before (see here and here ). You can use LoadandCite in a code chunk near the beginning of a knitr reproducible research document to load all of the R packages you will use in the document and automatically generate a BibTeX file you can draw on to c...