Papers › A complex network analysis of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) package ecosystem
A complex network analysis of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) package ecosystem
Marçal Mora-Cantallops, Salvador Sánchez-Alonso, Elena García-Barriocanal
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Free and open source software package ecosystems have existed for a long time and are among the most sophisticated human-made systems. One of the oldest and most popular software package ecosystems is CRAN, the repository of packages of the statistical language R, which is also one of the most popular environments for statistical computing nowadays. CRAN stores a large number of packages that are updated regularly and depend on a number of other packages in a complex graph of relations; such graph is empirically studied from the perspective of complex network analysis (CNA) in the current article, showing how network theory and measures proposed by previous work can help profiling the ecosystem and detecting strengths, good practices and potential risks in three perspectives: macroscopic properties of the ecosystem (structure and complexity of the network), microscopic properties of individual packages (represented as nodes), and modular properties (community detection). Results show how complex network analysis tools can be used to assess a package ecosystem and, in particular, that of CRAN.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections