spread_ris: Convert bibliographic records from long to wide format
In agoldst/mlaibr: Tools for exploring data from the MLA bibliography

Description Usage Arguments Details Value See Also

The data frame from read_ris has many rows for each bibliographic record. Many questions relate to bibliographic items as a unit, in which case it is convenient to have a data frame in the corresponding wide form. However, note that this is a somewhat non-normalized format since many RIS fields can repeat within a record. Repeat fields are joined into a single string value.

1	spread_ris(x, multi_sep = ";;")

`x`	data frame with `id,field,value` columns
`multi_sep`	separator string for repeated fields. Should not occur within field values.

It would be a little more formal to produce list columns from repeating fields, but that's just a drag. It may make more sense to normalize by hand by making separate tables of the repeating columns and keying to ID (or accession number), then spreading out only the single columns of interest here.

data frame with one row for each bibliographic item record and one column for each field. Missing values are represented with NA.

read_ris

agoldst/mlaibr documentation built on May 10, 2019, 7:34 a.m.