A practical guide to the R package Luminescence

Overview & Synopsis

A practical guide for the R package 'Luminescence' is provided. An introduction on data types in R is given first, followed by a guideline on how to import, analyse and visualise typical SAR-OSL measurement data. Introduction Since the R package 'Luminescence' has been introduced by Kreutzer et al. (2012) the developer team is continuously asked for advice from the luminescence dating community. Such requests considerably help us to further improve the package and make the tools more efficient and user friendly. However, most of these queries are not directed to specific problems of the provided functions but rather on the usage of R and the package in general. Motivated by an e-mail conversation with Geoff Duller this contribution aims to provide an example-based, short practical guide to R and the package 'Luminescence'. First, we focus on properties and ways to index different sorts of data structures, which are essential for an efficient use of the R package 'Luminescence'. A second section describes processing steps for luminescence data, from importing a BIN-file to plotting a D e distribution. A third section comprises the examples in a comprehensive code section. Throughout the manuscript R calls or R related code snippets are typed in monospaced letters. In some cases, numerical and graphical output was truncated for illustrative reasons.