CRAN rejection based on "references describing the methods in your package"

Question

I received this cryptic CRAN message :

Thanks,

If there are references describing the methods in your package, please add these in the description field of your DESCRIPTION file in the form authors (year) doi:... authors (year) arXiv:... authors (year, ISBN:...) or if those are not available: https:... with no space after 'doi:', 'arXiv:', 'https:' and angle brackets for auto-linking.

Please fix and resubmit, and document what was changed in the submission comments.

I don't get it, the DESCRIPTION file seems quite standard, here it is :

Package: inops
Title: Infix Operators for Detection, Subsetting and Replacement
Version: 0.0.1
Authors@R: c(
    person("Antoine", "Fabri", email = "***@gmail.com", role = c("aut", "cre")),
    person("Karolis", "Koncevičius", email = "***@gmail.com", role = "aut")
    )
Description: Infix operators to detect, subset, and replace the elements matched by a given condition.
  The functions have several variants of operator types, including subsets, ranges, regular expressions and others.
  Implemented operators work on vectors, matrices, and lists.
Depends: R (>= 3.1.0)
License: GPL-3
Encoding: UTF-8
LazyData: true
RoxygenNote: 6.1.1
Suggests:
    testthat (>= 2.1.0),
    purrr,
    knitr,
    rmarkdown,
    dplyr,
    nycflights13
URL: https://github.com/moodymudskipper/inops
BugReports: https://github.com/moodymudskipper/inops/issues
VignetteBuilder: knitr
Roxygen: list(markdown = TRUE)

Seems related to bullet points 5 to 7 but I don't see how it's relevant here : https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/submission_checklist.html

Any idea what's expected from me here ?

The repo if it helps : https://github.com/moodymudskipper/inops

Carvel

Do you have mentions of "isbn" or "arxiv" elsewhere in the package? I would guess (idk) that perhaps they believe you have made a reference elsewhere and are encouraging you to do it "formally". (The mailing list is probably a better place.) – Braunite

The mailing list won't give me my socratic badge! jk thanks I might adress my issue there if I don't get a satisfying answer here. We're thinking also to resubmit with URL and BugReports fields in the description file and see what happens. – Carvel

Just resubmit and “document” in your resubmission that your package does not reference academic publications. – Myxomycete

Answer 1

The response hints at referencing academic publications, if your package doesn't have any, resubmit as is and say so in the comments (or in the CRAN-COMMENTS.md file if you use devtools to publish), I would include their initial response there as well for context.

CRAN maintainers are not perfect and we might receive the odd message from time to time, this might be a miscalibrated copy and paste from their part don't let it intimidate you nor hold it against them.

Carvel

Answer 2

If you are using RStudio to create your package, can you follow this checking? http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/check.html

devtools::check()

And follow the prompt, it might help you find the problem.

Chardin