Beyond Software Distribution: CRAN as a Community-Built Information Service for Research Software

This preprint examines the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) as a community-built information service for research software. Using a computational audit of 23,814 active contributed packages, the study develops a CRAN Information Signal Framework covering six functional domains: discovery, description, evaluation, learning, interoperability, and scholarly credit. The analysis shows that technical reliability signals are highly standardized across the ecosystem, whereas citation guidance, persistent identifiers, and other scholarly-credit signals remain much less consistently available. The study argues that CRAN functions effectively as an infrastructure for software discovery, evaluation, and use, but less consistently as an infrastructure for scholarly attribution and credit. The framework contributes to library and information science, research software management, and scholarly communication by providing a systematic way to evaluate how software repositories support researchers’ information needs and how technical infrastructures shape the visibility and recognition of research software.