getCitations: Identify contributing studies

In clootl: Fetch and Explore the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Open Tree of Life Avian Phylogeny

Identify contributing studies

Description

Quantify the contribution of studies informing an extracted tree, and obtain DOI and citation information for those studies.

Usage

getCitations(tree, version = 1.6, data_path = FALSE)

Arguments

tree	A phylogeny obtained from extractTree (see details).
version	The version of the tree used in extract tree. Default to the most recent version of the tree. and can be passed as a character string or as numeric. If an alternate version was used to create the tree this function may fail or give incomplete or incorrect citation information.
data_path	Default to FALSE. If you are gathering citations for an older version of the tree than the current one packed in the data object, you will have already downloaded the data repo in order to generate that tree. The data is available at https://github.com/McTavishLab/AvesData. If you have manually downloaded the repo, use data_path= the path to the download location. Alternately, you can download the full data repo using get_avesdata_repo(). This approach will download the data and set an environmental variable AVESDATA_PATH. When AVESDATA_PATH is set, the data_path argument will default to this value. To manually set AVESDATA_PATH to the location of your downloaded AvesData repo use set_avesdata_repo_path()

Details

The function will determine what proportion of nodes in your phylogeny are supported by each study that goes into creating the final clootl tree. We use 'supported by' in the sense described in Redelings and Holder, PeerJ (2017) https://peerj.com/articles/3058/, and as shown in the tree.opentreeoflife.org tree viewer. We normalize these values to a percentage of internal nodes in the target tree supported by each study. In any resulting publication, please cite both the synthetic tree (McTavish et al. 2025), clootl (Miller et al. 2025) and "all" the trees/DOIs that contributed to your phylogeny. That said, we are well aware of citation and word count limits that plague modern publishing, and for this reason we quantify the contribution of each study; depending on your phylogeny, it is very possible that one or two studies contributed the majority of information. This function relies on the phylogenetic synthesis information directly, and is agnostic to taxonomy version.

Value

A dataframe of the percent of internal nodes supported by a given study, as well as the DOI of that study. The proportion of taxa in the tree supported by taxonomic addition only is also included in the dataframe.

Author(s)

Eliot Miller, Emily Jane McTavish

Examples

#pull the taxonomy file out
data(clootl_data)
tax <- clootl_data$taxonomies$year2025
ls(tax)
#simulate extracting a tree for a particular family
temp <- tax[tax$FAMILY=="Rhinocryptidae (Tapaculos)",]
spp <- temp$SCI_NAME

#get your tree
prunedTree <- extractTree(species=spp, label_type="scientific",
   taxonomy_year=2025, version="1.6")

#get your citation DF
yourCitations <- getCitations(tree=prunedTree)

clootl documentation built on April 24, 2026, 1:07 a.m.