ABSTRACT
Citing data and source code presents unique problems. Data and source code can change and be updated over time in a way that published articles and books generally are not. As such we have a much less developed, or at least less commonly used set of standards for citing these types of materials. In the United States and many other countries, research, including computer code made available via the internet, is automatically given copyright protection. However, copyright protection works against the scientific goals of reproducible research, because work derived from the research falls under the original copyright protections. Developing R functions and putting them into packages is a good way to enable cumulative knowledge development. Many researchers spend a considerable amount of time writing code to solve problems that no one has addressed yet, or haven’t addressed in a way that they believe is adequate.
