R interface with Web of Science Web Services API

Note : Only the Lite version of the API is accessible.

Package status : I never really used this package, so its development is stalled unfortunately. If someone wants to take it over, feel free to fork this repo !

Installation

Not on CRAN, install directly from GitHub :

install.packages("devtools")  # if required
devtools::install_github("juba/rwos")

Usage

First, you need to authenticate against the service and get a session identifier.

library(rwos)
sid <- wos_authenticate()

You can the use this session id to run search queries with wos_search :

res <- wos_search(sid, "AU=Wickham Hadley")

This will display the number of results found. You can then retrieve all records from this search results with wor_retrieve_all :

pubs <- wos_retrieve_all(res)

Or just a fraction of them with wos_retrieve :

pubs <- wos_retrieve(res, first = 10, count = 15)

The result is a tibble (a data frame) with the different records fields as columns.

API usage

API version

Only the Lite version of the API is accessible for now, which means :

• Access without authentication
• Limited set of returned data
• Records retrieving limited to batches of 100

Collections

The search collections available with the lite API are SCI, ISTP, ISSHP, IC. You can narrow your search to a subset of those with the editions argument :

wos_search(sid, 'TS=soil', editions = c("SCI", "IC"))

Queries against other editions will result in a Not authorized error message.

Searching for exact several words expressions

When searching for text with a keyword like TS, you must enclose it into double quotes if you want to look for exact phrases. For example, the following search will look for the exact soil health expression :

wos_search(sid, 'TS="soil health"')

Whereas the following will be equivalent to search for (soil AND health) :

wos_search(sid, "TS='soil health'"")

Limiting by document type

It seems you can narrow your search by document type with the DT operator, like this :

wos_search(sid, "((TS=(soil AND health)) AND (DT=(Article OR Book OR Book Chapter)))")

This has not been well tested, so use it with caution and don't hesitate to report any issue.

Links

Lite API technical documentation : http://ipscience-help.thomsonreuters.com/wosWebServicesLite/WebServicesLiteOverviewGroup/Introduction.html

General API FAQ : http://ip-science.interest.thomsonreuters.com/data-integration

Sample data : http://ip-science.interest.thomsonreuters.com/sample-data/?elqTrackId=4face30b453a4df981d9135a688b4868&elqaid=3746&elqat=2