Getting ecology and evolution journal titles from R
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So I want to mine some #altmetrics data for some research I’m thinking about doing. The steps would be:
- Get journal titles for ecology and evolution journals.
- Get DOI’s for all papers in all the above journal titles.
- Get altmetrics data on each DOI.
- Do some fancy analyses.
- Make som pretty figs.
- Write up results.
It’s early days, so jus working on the first step. However, getting a list of journals in ecology and evolution is frustratingly hard. This turns out to not be that easy if you are (1) trying to avoid Thomson Reuters, and (2) want a machine interface way to do it (read: API).
Unfortunately, Mendeley’s API does not have methods for getting a list of journals by field, or at least I don’t know how to do it using their API. No worries though – Crossref comes to save the day. Here’s my attempt at this using the Crossref OAI-PMH.
I wrote a little while loop to get journal titles from the Crossref OAI-PMH. This takes a while to run, but at least it works on my machine – hopefully yours too!
library(XML)
library(RCurl)
token <- "characters" # define a iterator, also used for gettingn the resumptionToken
nameslist <- list() # define empty list to put joural titles in to
while (is.character(token) == TRUE) {
baseurl <- "http://oai.crossref.org/OAIHandler?verb=ListSets"
if (token == "characters") {
tok2 <- NULL
} else {
tok2 <- paste("&resumptionToken=", token, sep = "")
}
query <- paste(baseurl, tok2, sep = "")
crsets <- xmlToList(xmlParse(getURL(query)))
names <- as.character(sapply(crsets[[4]], function(x) x[["setName"]]))
nameslist[[token]] <- names
if (class(try(crsets[[2]]$.attrs[["resumptionToken"]])) == "try-error") {
stop("no more data")
} else token <- crsets[[2]]$.attrs[["resumptionToken"]]
}
Yay! Hopefully it worked if you tried it. Let's see how long the list of journal titles is.
sapply(nameslist, length) # length of each list
characters c65ebc3f-b540-4672-9c00-f3135bf849e3
10001 10001
6f61b343-a8f4-48f1-8297-c6f6909ca7f7
6864
allnames <- do.call(c, nameslist) # combine to list
length(allnames)
[1] 26866
Now, let's use some regex to pull out the journal titles that are likely ecology and evolutionary biology journals. The ^ symbol says "the string must start here". The \\s means whitespace. The [] lets you specify a set of letters you are looking for, e.g., [Ee] means capital E OR lowercase e. I threw in titles that had the words systematic and natrualist too. Tried to trim any whitespace as well using the stringr package.
library(stringr)
ecotitles <- as.character(allnames[str_detect(allnames, "^[Ee]cology|\\s[Ee]cology")])
evotitles <- as.character(allnames[str_detect(allnames, "^[Ee]volution|\\s[Ee]volution")])
systtitles <- as.character(allnames[str_detect(allnames, "^[Ss]ystematic|\\s[Ss]systematic")])
naturalist <- as.character(allnames[str_detect(allnames, "[Nn]aturalist")])
ecoevotitles <- unique(c(ecotitles, evotitles, systtitles, naturalist)) # combine to list
ecoevotitles <- str_trim(ecoevotitles, side = "both") # trim whitespace, if any
length(ecoevotitles)
[1] 188
# Just the first ten titles
ecoevotitles[1:10]
[1] "Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease"
[2] "Population Ecology"
[3] "Researches on Population Ecology"
[4] "Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology"
[5] "Microbial Ecology"
[6] "Biochemical Systematics and Ecology"
[7] "FEMS Microbiology Ecology"
[8] "Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology"
[9] "Applied Soil Ecology"
[10] "Forest Ecology and Management"
Get the .Rmd file used to create this post at my github account.
Written in Markdown, with help from knitr, and nice knitr highlighting/etc. in in RStudio.
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