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As part of my social psychology academic research paper, I have difficulty finding information about Software citations. I used the 'R Studio' IDE to do the statistical analysis, and used 'Qualtrics' for my survey.

According to the APA 7, do I even need to cite them? If so, how?

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    R Studio is an editor, you used R to do your analysis.
    – Azor Ahai -him-
    Commented Jun 20, 2023 at 22:42
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    Please differentiate between R (the software package) and RStudio (the IDE). R contains the logic that we are interested in here. RStudio is just the IDE used to work with R. Citing RStudio makes about as much sense as citing Microsoft Word, which the paper was presumably written in.
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 6:36
  • For reproducibility, you may want to cite. Is it compulsory I think it's not. Note that you may simply note R and RStudio (with their versions) within your text
    – semmyk-research
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 7:52

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You may want to give this Academia question a read.

I'm unsure if RStudio will fall under the common software category within the context of your discipline. Might be worthwhile referencing though for reproducibility.

There's a difference between R and RStudio (the IDE).

APA provides a guide for citing Data Sets, Software, and Tests 10.10 Computer Software, Mobile Apps, Apparatuses, and Equipment

ECU has APA 7 guide for software referencing.

A commonly used citation is (see for instance NIST's citation which is not APA):
RStudio Team. 2020. RStudio: Integrated Development Environment for R. Boston, MA: RStudio, PBC. http://www.rstudio.com/

However, given the 'takeover/overhaul', we'll be looking at:
RStudio Team. (2023). RStudio Desktop IDE (Version 2023.06.0-421) [Computer software]. PBC. https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio/

NB: I believe http://www.rstudio.com/ should be replaced with the proper Posit link.

For R, you can tag along the line:
R Core Team (2023). R (4.3.1) : A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org

  • NB: you may use the citation() function in R

[For noting] Please note suggested generic citation from Posit (PBC) without versioning!

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  • RStudio is not created by the "R Team", whatever that is. There is an R Core Team that is the collective author of R. May I suggest you edit your post? You give three different citations for RStudio (which I would argue it does not make sense to cite at all), and one for R (which should indeed be cited, but with the version number, please), but without a leading bullet point, so it may get missed.
    – Stephan Kolassa
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 6:41
  • @StephanKolassa Thanks. You're right, there's the R core team and there's the RStudio team (which now falls under Posit). RStudio Team remain commonly used. The 'bullet point' was for emphasis, but I see it gets misinterpreted, so I've removed. Thanks for that.
    – semmyk-research
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 7:44
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It could be important to cite specific packages that you use within R. These documentations are easily findable with a google search of the package.

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