Use of R for biostatistics publications Presumably this has been discussed already, but I wanted to get some sense of how prevalent is the use of R for biostatistics publications. On PubMed I did find a number of research papers that were conducted using R (as mentioned in the Methods or Statistical Analysis sections of the documents). However, the majority were done using SAS/SPSS and also an appreciable number using Stata.
There has been a lot of talk about R in recent years and I am looking for some data that can corroborate the fact that R has been rising in popularity in the commercial area. In my experience, however, I have been seeing some resistance for firms to switch to R from SAS, even though there is so much more that you can do with R compared to SAS.  There is also the concern that FDA "prefers results in SAS" ... although I have not seen anything officially mentioned by FDA to this effect.
I understand that SAS has been there for decades, it is what many R&D departments are most comfortable working with, etc., etc., ... and am looking for real-world examples of who are instead using R for professional research and/or publications.
 A: You ask two very different Qs: 
1) "R has been rising in popularity in the commercial area"? 
2) "How prevalent is the use of R for biostatistics publications"? 
Regarding 1), I'll put it bluntly: despite all this tedious talk about R, I have worked in 5 countries across 3 continents and inside the industry I never once heard anybody refer to R. I worked for very large multinational companies and startups, and CROs and pharma. They use SAS. Simply look at the industry association for prgrammers, i.e. Phuse. And what are they discussing at their conference? And what are they asking for in the job adverts? E.g. pharma jobs The first job I looked at says: "Extensive SAS programming expertise to an advanced level". Says nothing about R, but this does not stop these impassioned and incessant R programmers from claiming the imminent death of SAS. 
Regarding 2), academics are much more interested in publishing and they are much more interested in R; thus you are fine to use R in this case, no problem there.  
