5.1 Evaluation criteria

In order to give the reader of this website an impression of the available books dealing with an introduction of R for linguists, hereafter I will evaluate the four books Analyzing linguistic data by BAAYEN, Quantitative corpus linguistics with R and Statistics for linguistics with R by GRIES, and Quantitative methods in linguistics by JOHNSON. The evaluation criteria are the following:

The book should contain an easily-understandable introduction to the statistical analysis of language for beginners with a non-mathematical background. Therefore, the author should introduce the basic principles and methods of statistical analysis and correctly use the concepts of statistics.

The chapters of the book should be well organized and structured in an instructionally sound sequence, with R code and output clearly marked and helpfully annotated. The process for creating statistics and graphs in R should be explained step-by-step.

Since they are great help for the reader, I will also comment on any additional materials such as exercises (with or without model answers), companion websites, or for instance a topical organization of R functions.

At the end of this chapter, I will give my personal evaluation for each of the four books and recommend books for further study.

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