rpubmed

Tools for extracting and processing records from Pubmed and Pubmed Central.

This project is still very much in development... Please contact me with any questions, suggestions or bug reports.

I have built in support for searching and processing MeSH headings, making this package of particular use for biomedical researchers conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Two of these functions (mesh_assoc_table and keyword_assoc_table) produce association matrices which can be fed into graph packages such as igraph to visualise the associations between different search terms.

Available functions:

• fetch - Tools for bulk downloading of Pubmed records
  • fetch_in_chunks(ids, chunk_size = 500, delay = 0, ...)
  • pubmed_fetch(ids, file_format = "xml", as_r_object = TRUE, ...)
• textsearch - Tools for text-mining of abstracts and metadata from downloaded records
  • get_articles_by_terms(corpus, term_list, where, case_sensitive = FALSE, ...)
  • record_counts_by_year(corpus)
• io - saving records to disk and printing summaries of abstract lists to file or sdout
  • write_JSON_file(x, file)
  • write_record_list(articles, out_file = "", abstract_p = FALSE, markdown_p = FALSE, linestart = "* ")
• locations - Geocoding functionality added for finding the coordinates of departments affiliated with Pubmed Articles.
  • geocode_addresses(addresses, sleeper = 0.33, depth = 3)
  • get_article_location_data(abstracts)
  • geocode_address(address, depth = 3)
• mesh - Tools for processing and exploring associations between MeSH headings and other keywords
  • mesh_assoc_table(corpus)
  • keyword_assoc_table(corpus, keyword_list, keyword_names, ...)
  • get_mesh_headings(article)
  • mesh_heading_frequency(corpus)