A strength of RStudio is its support for reproducible analyses[5] with R Markdown vignettes. These allow users to mix text with code in R, Python, Julia, shell scripts, SQL, Stan, JavaScript, C, C++, Fortran, and others,[6] similar to Jupyter Notebooks. R Markdown can be used to create dynamic reports that are automatically updated when new data become available. These reports can also be exported in various formats, including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, and LaTeX, with templates specific to the requirements of many scientific journals.[7]
R Markdown vignettes and Jupyter notebooks make the data analysis completely reproducible. R Markdown vignettes have been included as appendices with tutorials on Wikiversity.[8]
In 2022, Posit announced an R Markdown-like publishing system called Quarto. In addition to combining results of R, code and results using Python, Julia, Observable JavaScript, and Jupyter notebooks can also be used in Quarto documents. Compared to the file extension .Rmd that R Markdown has, Quarto documents have the file extension .qmd.[9]
One difference between R Markdown files and Quarto documents is defining options in code chunks. In R Markdown, they would be inline within the curly brackets.
RStudio Desktop and RStudio Server are both available in free and fee-based (commercial) editions. OS support depends on the format/edition of the IDE. Prepackaged distributions of RStudio Desktop are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. RStudio Server and Server Pro run on Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux, CentOS, openSUSE and SLES.[10]
The RStudio IDE is partly written in the C++ programming language and uses the Qt framework for its graphical user interface.[11] The bigger percentage of the code is written in Java. JavaScript is also used.[12]
Work on the RStudio IDE started around December 2010,[13] and the first public beta version (v0.92) was officially announced in February 2011.[1]Version 1.0 was released on 1 November 2016.[14] Version 1.1 was released on 9 October 2017.[15]
The RStudio IDE provides a mechanism for executing R functions interactively from within the IDE through the Addins menu.[16] This enables packages to include Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for increased accessibility. Popular R packages that use this feature include:
The RStudio IDE is developed by Posit, PBC, a public-benefit corporation[17] founded by J. J. Allaire,[18] creator of the programming language ColdFusion. Posit has no formal connection to the R Foundation, a not-for-profit organization located in Vienna, Austria,[19] which is responsible for overseeing development of the R environment for statistical computing. Posit was formerly known as RStudio Inc. In July 2022, it announced that it changed its name to Posit, to signify its broadening exploration towards other programming languages such as Python.[20]
^Reproducibility is key in science. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper wrote, "non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science." But a theory is "falsified only if we discover a reproducible effect which refutes the theory". Popper (1968, p. 86). However, reproducibility is not easy to obtain. In a 2016 survey of over 1,500 scientists, 52% agreed that there was "a significant crisis" in the reproducibility of scientific results. Another 38% said there was "a slight crisis"; 7% "didn't know", and only 3% said there was no crisis. Worse, "more than 70% of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half had failed to reproduce their own experiments (emphasis added). See Baker (2016).
