ICPSR releases new datasets in R format

ICPSR is pleased to announce that most new datasets we release will now be available in R format. Along with data files readable by software packages SAS, SPSS and Stata, data can now be downloaded as R datasets with the .rda extension.

 

ICPSR has been releasing files in R since the beginning of the year, and currently has nearly 150 datasets available in the format.

 

ICPSR Council member John Fox, a contributor to the R Project for Statistical Computing, and professor of sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said: "Since its advent in the 1990s, R has become standard software for statisticians, and its use has subsequently spread dramatically to other fields, including the social and behavioral sciences. The ICPSR data archive is arguably the most important resource of its kind. It is therefore a very welcome development that data in the ICPSR archive will soon become much more conveniently accessible to R users."

 

R files are available from each dataset's download page under the "Dataset(s)" section. ICPSR will be adding R files for studies that undergo updates, but is not planning to retrofit the full collection.