How do I determine the author of an R package?

Question

How can I determine who the authors of a package are? Given that we have this widely used code base, I think it is appropriate that I make a reference to the software I use in m

Answer 1

Some cleaning needed, but you get the idea. :)

library(RCurl)
gg <- getURL("http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggdendro/index.html")
gg <- readLines(textConnection(gg))
gg[grep("Author:", gg)+1]
 [1] "Andrie de Vries"

Richie beat me to it, but here's a short way of extracting some information using citation.

citation("ggdendro")$author
[1] "Andrie de Vries "

In comments, Hadley suggested another method of reading straight from the DESCRIPTION file.

> gg <- read.dcf(url("http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggdendro/DESCRIPTION"))
> gg[, "Maintainer"]
                           Maintainer 
"Andrie de Vries "