When the temptation is growing in you to try your hand at quantitative methods, the first question is likely to be "but how can I do, and which tools should I learn to use?" I give here some arguments to engage yourself in learning R and then present different tutorials and R packages useful for historians of economics.
This paper discusses the transformation of the content, role, and status of economic research at the Bank of England (BoE) in the past 60 years. We show how three factors (policy functions and missions of the Bank, its organisational structure, and the attitude of its executives towards economics) shaped the evolution of in-house BoE economic research during three distinctive periods (1960-1991; 1992-2007; 2007 - 2020). Our account relies on a broad set of sources and methods (BoE publications, archives, interviews with current and former BoE economists, citation analysis, prosopography, and topic modelling).