Web-scraping, or web-crawling, sounds like a seedy activity worthy of an Interpol investigative department. The reality, however, is far less nefarious. Web-scraping is any procedure by which someone extracts data from the internet. Given that it’s possible to get the internet on computers these days; web-scrapping opens an array of interesting possibilities to social-science researchers 
pie( table( whence.i.tweet )) qplot( whence ) + coord_polar() pie( log( table( whence )))+RColorBrewer ggplot (see below) plot( density( tweets.len )) qplot(... stat="density") + geom_density qplot(...stat="bin") + geom_text(...) tweeple tweep...
Scraping table from any web page with R or CloudStat: You need to use the data from internet, but don’t type, you can just extract or scrape them if you know the web URL. Thanks to XML package from R. It provides amazing readHTMLtable() function. For...
Google scholar has now made Google Scholar Citations profiles available to anyone. You can read about these profiles and set one up for yourself here. I asked John Muschelli and Andrew Jaffe to write me a function that would download my Google Scholar...
I will assume you have read through part 1 and have the csv file loaded. While we covered some basic graphing in the last post i hope to get into a little more of the data crunching. Specifically I am interested in the names which where driven by a spe...
Kay Cichini recently wrote a word-cloud R function called GScholarScraper on his blog which when given a search string will scrape the associated search results returned by Google Scholar, across pages, and then produce a word-cloud visualisation. This was of interest to me because around the same time I posted an independent Google Scholar scraper function get_google_scholar_df() 
Based on my previous post on Web Scraping I coded and uploaded the Function "GScholarScraper" HERE for testing!The function will pull all (!) results, processing pages in chunks of 100 results/titles, and return a file with all titles, links, etc. It w...
This is a followup to a post I uploaded earlier today about web scraping data off Google Scholar. In that post I was frustrated because I’m not smart enough to use xpathSApply to get the kind of results I wanted. However fast-forward to the evening whilst having dinner with a friend, as a passing remark, 
I wanted to scrape the information returned by a Google Scholar web search into an R data frame as a quick XPath exercise. The following will successfully extract the ‘title’, ‘url’ , ‘publication’ and ‘description’. If any of these fields are not available, as in the case of a citation, the corresponding cell in the data 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
