Feedback from vignette survey

8 Jan 2012 Musing

Many thanks to all who participated in the survey about writing R package vignettes.

Following my post last Thursday the responses came in quickly in the evening and all day on Friday. Since Saturday the response rate has been decreasing constantly and I think it is time for a summary based on the 56 responses received.

Summary - How to write a good vignette

Length: Trust yourself, but aim for about 20 pages.
Language: Don’t use language which assumes that the reader is an R and/or subject expert.
Structure: Include at least the following sections:
- Examples
- Introduction
- Case studies
- References
It would be nice to include also sections on:
- Support
- Motivation
- Road map
Examples: Use lots of examples and don’t repeat just the examples from the help pages.
Get inspiration from: Rcpp, reshape, plyr, vegan, and see below for more.
Secrets of good vignettes:
- Provide an introduction with a clear purpose of the package.
- Work with case studies, walk the reader through a task from start to finish.
- Demonstrate the non-default arguments of the package functions, highlight why and when you want to change them.
- Write briefly and concisely, but provide reference/footnotes to relevant literature and further help.
- Provide dummy data to play with.
- Discuss limitations.
What else: Potentially split the vignette into several documents, see Rcpp for an example.

About the survey participants

Expertise: Most participants seem to be medium to advanced R users. This is not a surprise - how else would they know about my blog or R-bloggers? Over 50% write their own functions and a further 45% create R packages.
Usage of vignettes: Over 75% use them often (based on ratings with 4/5 or 5/5). Thus, vignettes are worth wile writing. They are often the starting point to learn more about a new package.
Writing experience: About 1/5 of the participants have written vignettes themselves and about another third have published papers, but not written vignettes or help pages.

Conclusions

This was an interesting experiment and I am really pleased with the turn out. The survey was completed by a good mixture of people, with varied experience and it showed the value of vignettes.

My big learning point is to focus more on the non-default arguments of the key package functions. I can see, that this really helps the reader to get a better understanding of the package and will help them to apply it better to their own problems and needs.

I was surprised by the relative high request for a support section in the vignette. Over 60% say that a support section would be at least nice to have. Even 14% think it is required. I wonder, if this means just an email address for questions, a mailing list, or commercial support. I would very much appreciate your feedback, either via email or comments below the post.

Charts

About the survey participants

R code

You can access the R code for all charts via github.

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Markus Gesmann (Jan 08, 2012) Feedback from vignette survey. Retrieved from https://magesblog.com/post/2012-01-08-feedback-from-vignette-survey/

BibTeX citation:

@misc{ 2012-feedback-from-vignette-survey,
author = { Markus Gesmann },
title = { Feedback from vignette survey },
url = { https://magesblog.com/post/2012-01-08-feedback-from-vignette-survey/ },
year = { 2012 }
updated = { Jan 08, 2012 }
}

vignette googleVis Soapbox survey R

Feedback from vignette survey

Summary - How to write a good vignette

About the survey participants

Conclusions

Charts

About the survey participants

R code

Citation

Markus Gesmann

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