Most universities offer short (no-credit) courses on it and free licenses. The other invaluable tool for an epidemiologist is a GIS program (almost everyone uses ArcGIS). TL DR: In short, R for research, SAS/SPSS for business or government when in doubt, R. On the contrary, R has the highest learning curve and therefore I'd bet that once you know R, the rest are easy to learn.įor some reason we do not seem to use SPSS in my lab, but I have heard good things about it. Don't think that knowing R only is a handicap. The open source nature of R is very useful for folks trying to do something new or trying to get it to play well with other languages or software.įor the majority of uses, almost all are equally capable. In fact, my lab doesn't even offer SAS or SPSS, I would have to go out of my way (and pay student license) to get it, while R-studio came pre-installed on my workstation. They say SAS is far better at handling giant data sets, so some research folks occasionally use SAS, but most of my colleagues use R.
Repeat or flagrant offenders will be bannedĮmory Rollins School of Public Health Job Boardįrom what I have seen, R is the preferred language for hard research, while SAS is the preferred software for large corporate and government jobs.Comments dismissing established science must provide peer-reviewed evidence.Non-professional personal anecdotes will be removed.
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