Who Did What? The Roles of R Package Authors and How to Refer to Them

Computational infrastructure for representing
persons and citations has been available
in R for several years, but has been restructured
through enhanced classes "person" and
"bibentry" in recent versions of R. The new
features include support for the specification of
the roles of package authors (e.g. maintainer,
author, contributor, translator, etc.) and more
flexible formatting/printing tools among various
other improvements. Here, we introduce
the new classes and their methods and indicate
how this functionality is employed in the management
of R packages. Specifically, we show
how the authors of R packages can be specified
along with their roles in package ´DESCRIPTION´
and/or ´CITATION´ files and the citations produced
from it.