<p>As far as I can tell, the example question should be squarely on-topic at Stack Overflow (&amp; the answer a fine one). Both <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic">https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic</a> &amp; the close reason</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software
  library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack
  Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam.
  Instead, <a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/139399">describe the
  problem</a> and what has been
  done so far to solve it.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>link to <a href="https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254393/what-exactly-is-a-recommendation-question/254394">What exactly is a recommendation question</a>, where a highly up-voted answer draws the distinction between describing a problem &amp; "shopping". It would also be suitable for the R-help mailing list. While I agree with @gung that there's no onus on CV to ensure that every type of question can be found a home somewhere on SE or the internet; I think we can, &amp; should, give the existence of other places to ask a given type <em>some</em> weight when considering our ambit. In particular, more overlap between SE sites than needed to avoid impractically tortuous delimitation of their scopes doesn't help anyone.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the example question's certainly off-topic here according to our current practice of closing questions that focus on "performing routine operations within a statistical computing platform". Perhaps our <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic">help/on-topic</a> should be clarified. Or perhaps we should embrace such questions&mdash;but I find it hard to imagine how we'd draw a line, even roughly, between the trivial &amp; the non-trivial or between the commonplace &amp; the recondite. Would we need to? "Does not show research effort" &amp; "not useful" are already reasons to down-vote, &amp; we could each vote in individual cases as we see fit rather than collectively struggle with legislation &amp; litigation.</p>
