Research papers published in low impact journals (impact factor ≤ 3): This subset consisted of 16,337 articles.

I collected the journal impact factor for 32,144 of the articles and divided the dataset into 2 parts: In order to answer this question, I compared the type of statistical software used in articles published in low versus high impact journals. Do beginners and professional scientists use the same statistical packages? This trend was calculated only for statistical packages with more than 100 mentions over the past 6 years, because otherwise, this number will be reflecting the noise more than the trend. The 6-year trend is the linear regression coefficient (reported in percent) obtained by regressing “the percent of articles that mention a particular software package each year” onto the “years” variable. The table below can be read in the following way:įor instance, SPSS was reported to be used in 16,616 out of 40,582 research papers (= 40.48%), and showed a decreasing trend of 1.43% over the past 6 years. Most popular statistical packages overall

Perhaps the most noticeable trend is the decline of SAS in 2021 which is being replaced by Stata and Microsoft Excel. The graph below shows that SPSS is still ranking number 1 for the past 6 years, R is in second position and Prism is third. This is in contrast with R and Prism, which were mentioned more commonly in papers published in high impact journals. However, R and Prism had the largest upward trends (+1.29% and +0.82% respectively).ģ- The data also suggest that SPSS is more popular among beginners. Here’s a summary of the key findingsġ- SPSS was the most used statistical software overall, mentioned in 40.48% of research papers, followed by R (20.52%) and Prism (17.38%).Ģ- The 6-year trend showed that SPSS had the largest decline (-1.43%) followed by SAS (-0.48%). Out of these 76,147 research papers, only 40,582 (53.3%) mentioned the use of at least 1 statistical software. (I used the BioC API to download the articles - see the References section below). I analyzed a random sample of 76,147 full-text research papers, uploaded to PubMed Central between the years 20, in order to check the popularity of statistical software among medical researchers.

Statistica 8 Software