softverse

Validated use lookup

How often each package is loaded by the code behind published papers. 3,223 packages across 8,349 deposits at economics and political science journals that check an author's code before publication. A download count rises when a build server installs a package; a count here rises when somebody publishes a paper that uses it.

Deposits counts each deposit once, however many times its code calls the package. Calls is the raw total. Share divides by the deposits containing code in that language, so a Stata share and an R share have different denominators and should not be read against each other. Repositories splits the count between the two collections, and the filter narrows to one.
Two things to know before relying on a number. A package can be loaded by code that never runs, so these are loads and not executions. And the Dataverse collection came from a 2024 scrape that kept only .do, .r and .py files, so packages used inside notebooks are under-counted on that side.
The paper gives the method and the tables are CC0.