In patrickbarks/abbrevr: Abbreviate Journal Titles Using The ISO 4 Standard

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)
options(digits = 4, width = 120)

abbrevr: An R package to abbreviate journal titles based on the ISO 4 standard

An outline of the ISO 4 rules for abbreviation can be found here, and a text file containing the ISSN List of Title Word Abbreviations (LTWA) can be found here.

Installation

Install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("patrickbarks/abbrevr")

Usage

Abbreviate individual titles:

library(abbrevr)

AbbrevTitle("Transactions of the American Fisheries Society")
AbbrevTitle("Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift")
AbbrevTitle("L'Intermédiaire des Mathématiciens")

Use rcrossref library to extract citation info for a set of DOIs, then abbreviate journal titles using abbrevr:

# load rcrossref
library(rcrossref)

# DOIs for a set of scientific publications
dois <- c(
  "10.1577/T09-174.1",
  "10.1371/journal.pone.0075858",
  "10.1111/1365-2435.12359",
  "10.1111/jeb.12823",
  "10.1111/1365-2745.12937"
)

# use rcrossref::cr_cn() to get citation info for DOIs
citations <- rcrossref::cr_cn(dois, format = "citeproc-json")

# extract journal titles from citation info
titles <- sapply(citations, function(x) x$`container-title`, USE.NAMES = FALSE)

# use abbrevr::AbbrevTitle() to abbreviate titles
titles_short <- sapply(titles, abbrevr::AbbrevTitle, USE.NAMES = FALSE)

# print data.frame
data.frame(
  doi = dois,
  title = titles,
  title_short = titles_short,
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

#>                          doi                                          title           title_short
#>            10.1577/T09-174.1 Transactions of the American Fisheries Society Trans. Am. Fish. Soc.
#> 10.1371/journal.pone.0075858                                       PLoS ONE              PLoS ONE
#>      10.1111/1365-2435.12359                             Functional Ecology          Funct. Ecol.
#>            10.1111/jeb.12823                Journal of Evolutionary Biology        J. Evol. Biol.
#>      10.1111/1365-2745.12937                             Journal of Ecology              J. Ecol.

Caveats

The current version...

• only handles common articles, prepositions, and conjunctions in English, German, and French (ISO 4 dictates that these classes should generally be ommitted, with exceptions noted in the document linked above)
• omits all punctuation except for hyphens (ISO 4 dictates all punctuation except commas should be retained, but periods should be replaced with commas)
• does not omit generic identifiers such as "Section", "Series", or "Part" (ISO 4 dictates such generics should be ommitted unless required for identification)
• may not retain all diacritic marks (ISO 4 dictates that all diacritic marks should be retained)

Also beware of abbreviation rules that are difficult to implement algorithmically, e.g.:

• names of persons should not be abbreviated
• prepositions and articles should be retained if they are integral parts of proper names (e.g. "Los Alamos") or locutions (e.g. "in vivo")

patrickbarks/abbrevr documentation built on Oct. 27, 2021, 3:25 a.m.