rcrossref-package: R Client for Various CrossRef APIs.

Description

R Client for Various CrossRef APIs.

Arguments

Crossref APIs

rcrossref interacts with the main Crossref metadata search API at https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc/blob/master/rest_api.md, the old metadata search API at http://search.labs.crossref.org/, their DOI Content Negotiation service at http://www.crosscite.org/cn/, and the Text and Data Mining project http://tdmsupport.crossref.org/.

Deprecated and Defunct

See rcrossref-deprecated and rcrossref-defunct for details.

What am I actually searching?

When you use the cr_*() functions in this package, you are using the Crossref search API described at https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc/blob/master/rest_api.md. When you search with query terms, on Crossref servers they are not searching full text, or even abstracts of articles, but only what is available in the data that is returned to you. That is, they search article titles, authors, etc. For some discussion on this, see https://github.com/CrossRef/rest-api-doc/issues/101.

Text mining

We provide the ability to do text mining in this package. See functions cr_ft_links and cr_ft_text. However, another package fulltext is designed solely for text mining, so try it for serious text mining.

High and Low Level APIs

For the Crossref search API (the functions cr_funders, cr_journals, cr_licenses, cr_members, cr_prefixes, cr_types, cr_works), there is a high level API and a low level. The high level is accessible through those functions just listed (e.g., cr_works), whereas the low level is accessible via the same fxn name with an underscore (e.g., cr_works_). The high level API does data requests, and parses to data.frame's. Since the high level API functions have been around a while, we didn't want to break their behavior, so the low level API functions are separate, and only do the data request, giving back json or a list, with no attempt to parse any further. The low level API functions will be faster because there's much less parsing, and therefore less prone to potential errors due to changes in the Crossref API that could cause parsing errors. Note that cursor feature works with both high and low level.