fulltext is a package I maintain for text-mining the scholarly literature (package docs). You can search for articles, fetch article metadata and abstracts, and fetch full text of some articles. Text-mining the scholarly literature is a research tool used across disciplines. Full text of articles (entire article, not just the abstract) is the gold standard in text-mining in most cases.

Introduction When I was in grad school at Emory, I had a favorite desk in the library. The desk wasn’t particularly cozy or private, but what it lacked in comfort it made up for in real estate. My books and I needed room to operate. Students of the ancient world require many tools, and when jumping between commentaries, lexicons, and interlinears, additional clutter is additional “friction”, i.e., lapses in thought due to frustration.

One of the greatest assets human beings possess is the power of speech and language, from which almost all our other accomplishments flow. To be able to analyse communication offers us a chance to gain a greater understanding of one another.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of posts from rOpenSci’s recent hackathon. I recently had the pleasure of participating in rOpenSci’s hackathon. To be honest, I was quite nervous to work among such notables, but I immediately felt welcome thanks to a warm and personable group. Alyssa Frazee has a great post summarizing the event, so check that out if you haven’t already.

A number of the APIs we interact with (e.g., PLOS full text API, and USGS’s BISON API in rplos and rbison, respectively) expose Solr endpoints. Solr is an Apache hosted project - it is a powerful search server.

rplos is an R package to facilitate easy search and full-text retrieval from all Public Library of Science (PLOS) articles, and we have a little feature which aren’t sure if is useful or not. I don’t actually do any text-mining for my research, so perhaps text-mining folks can give some feedback. You can quickly get a lot of results back using rplos, so perhaps it is useful to quickly browse what you got.

Open access week is here! We love open access, and think it’s extremely important to publish in open access journals. One of the many benefits of open access literature is that we likely can use the text of articles in OA journals for many things, including text-mining. What’s even more awesome is some OA publishers provide API (application programming interface) access to their full text articles.