Abstract
The sports statistics community is rapidly evolving. R is an open-source software in constant development that has gained a lot of popularity within statistical communities and sports analytics. This work presents a systematic review of the available R CRAN sport packages following PRISMA guidelines. We consider all packages active as of 18 February 2021. A total of 81 sport R packages created since 2006 were detected. Of these, 35.9% were authored by an American national, 69.1% include a dataset, 43.2% provide vignettes, and 65.4% have been updated at least once. The sport with the highest representation is basketball (n = 14, 17.3%), followed by soccer (n = 12, 14.8%) and packages related to physical activity (n = 11, 13.6%). There are no sports packages directed solely for the female gender, while 59.3% of packages are focused on professional athletes. Fifty packages (61.7%) are related to the sports performance analysis category, and web scraping (n = 43, 53.1%) was the main functionality in the collected packages. The creation of new R packages in the area of sports could help solve questions and tasks that still remain a challenge in this field, while continuing to help to improve the level of statistical education and computational thinking skills.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
