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17 October 2011 Go to comments

Dembe, Partridge, and Geist (2011, pdf), in a paper recently published in BMC Health Services Research, report that Stata and SAS were “overwhelmingly the most commonly used software applications employed (in 46% and 42.6% of articles respectively)”. The articles referred to were those in health services research studies published in the U.S.

Good company. Both are, in our humble opinion, excellent packages, although we admit to have a preference for one of them.

We should mention that the authors report that SAS usage grew considerably during the study period, and that Stata usage held roughly constant, a conclusion that matches the results in their Table 1, an extract of which is

2007 2008 2009 2007-2009
total articles 393 374 372 1,139
included articles 282 308 287 877
% Stata used 48.3 42.6 47.4 46.0
% SAS used 37.2 43.1 47.4 42.6

The authors speculated that the growth of SAS “may have been stimulated by enhancements […] that gave users the ability to use balanced repeated replication (BRR) and jackknife methods for variance estimation with complex survey data […]”. Since those features were already in Stata, that sounds reasonable to us.

Let us just say, good company. Good companies.

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