Reviews of Free Statistical Software
There are a few reviews of free statistical software. There were two reviews in journals (but not peer reviewed), one by Zhu and Kuljaca and another article by Grant that included mainly a brief review of R. Zhu and Kuljaca outlined some useful characteristics of software, such as ease of use, having a number of statistical procedures and ability to develop new procedures. They reviewed several programs and identified which ones, at that time, had the most functionality. At that time, several of the programs may not have had all of the desired ability for advanced statistics. Grant reviewed some of the programing features of R, and briefly mentioned the availability of other programs. One other paper reviewed statistical packages, mainly commercial, but includes R. One article reviewed EasyReg and included a discussion of its accuracy.
Only one review has compared the output of various packages. In this review, all of the packages read either CSV files or EXCEL format. All of the packages gave exactly the same results for correlation and regression. The free software packages also gave the same regression results as did excel. One of the main differences among the packages was how they handled missing data. With the example data sets used in the review, and for the package versions available in November 2006 when this review was conducted, two packages, MicrOsiris and Epi Info, could read files with blanks for missing. Two other programs, Stat4U and WinIdams need something for the missing, like -9 or -9.99. The other packages could only handle data sets with no missing values.
Two websites that list software also have very brief reviews of each package. These two sites are StatCon and by Pezzullo. These sites mainly offer a brief list of the features available in the packages. Similarly, one other web site compares the statistical procedures available on free statistical packages. In this review, R had all of the procedures, OpenStat had 16, MacAnova had 15, and Microsiris had 12. The others had from 8 to 11 of the procedures.
There is also a journal specifically for statistical software, although the main focus is on commercial software, R and some coding snippets.
In contrast, there are various reviews of commercial statistical software, such as a comparison between several major packages and a brief review of several packages.
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“I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.”
—Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)
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