Another 1000 packages were added to CRAN and this time in less than 12 months. Today (2014-10-29) on The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) package page:

“Currently, the CRAN package repository features 6000 available packages.”

Going from 5000 to 6000 packages took 355 days – which means that it on average was only ~8.5 hours between each new packages added. It is actually even be more frequent since dropped packages are not accounted for. The 6000 packages on CRAN are maintained by 3444 people. Thanks to all package developers and to the CRAN Team for handling all this! You can give back by carefully reporting bugs to the maintainers and properly citing any packages you use in your publications, cf. citation("pkg name"). Milestones: 2014-10-29: 6000 packages 2013-11-08: 5000 packages 2012-08-23: 4000 packages 2011-05-12: 3000 packages 2009-10-04: 2000 packages 2007-04-12: 1000 packages 2004-10-01: 500 packages 2003-04-01: 250 packages These data are for CRAN only. There are many more packages elsewhere, e.g. Bioconductor, R-Forge (sic!), RForge (sic!), Github etc.