In ropensci/IEEER: Interface to the IEEE Xplore Gateway

IEEE stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. It publishes well over 100 peer-reviewed journals from IEEE Antennas and Propagation to IEEE Nuclear to IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics & Frequency Control Society.

The IEEER package is an R interface to the IEEE Xplore Search Gateway.

# check connection to IEEE; abort if no connection
library(knitr)
library(IEEER)
if(!can_IEEE_connect()) {
    opts_knit$set(stop_on_error = 2L)
    stop("Cannot connect to IEEE")
}

options(IEEER_delay=0.5)

Installation

The IEEER package is not currently available on CRAN. To install the package from GitHub, use devtools::install_github(), as follows:

install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
install_github("ropensci/IEEER")

Basic use

Use IEEE_search() to search the IEEE Xplore Search Gateway and IEEE_count() to get a simple count of articles matching a query.

Suppose we wanted to identify all IEEE manuscripts with “Rabiner, L.” as an author. It is best to first get a count, so that we have a sense of how many records the search will return. We first use library() to load the IEEER package and then IEEE_count() to get the count.

library(IEEER)
IEEE_count(list(au="Rabiner, L"))

The search query could be single character string as free text, "Rabiner, L", but in that case it will be a general search and not specific to the author field. To search just for an author, we use a list with names corresponding to the possible query parameters; au for author, ti for title, etc. The package includes a dataset query_param with the parameter abbreviations, taken from a table at the IEEE Xplore Search page.

To get a count of the number of records with Rabiner, L as author and Markov in the title, we would use:

IEEE_count(list(au="Rabiner, L", ti="Markov"))

To obtain the actual records matching the query, use IEEE_search().

rec <- IEEE_search(list(au="Rabiner, L", ti="Markov"))
nrow(rec)

The default is to grab no more than 10 records; this limit can be changed with the limit argument. But note that you should avoid downloading a large number of records; more on this below.

Also note that the result of IEEE_search() has an attribute "totalfound" containing the total count of search results; this is the same as what IEEE_count() provides.

attr(rec, "totalfound")

The following will get us all r IEEE_count(list(au="Rabiner, L", ti="Markov")) records.

rec <- IEEE_search(list(au="Rabiner, L", ti="Markov"), limit=50)
nrow(rec)

IEEE_search() returns a data frame with each row being a single manuscript. The columns are the different fields (e.g., authors, title, abstract, etc.).

Forming queries

The query argument to IEEE_count() and IEEE_search() can be a single character string, for a general text search, but more often it will be a named list of character strings, with the names corresponding to the possible query parameters.

Query parameters

The IEEER package includes a dataset query_param that lists the terms (like au) that you can use. Here is the first five

query_param[1:5,]

These are taken from a table at the IEEE Xplore Search page.

Search results

The output of IEEE_search() is a data frame with the following columns.

res <- IEEE_search(list(au="Rabiner, L"), limit=1)
names(res)

The columns are described in the help file for IEEE_search(). Try ?IEEE_search.

Sorting results

The IEEE_search() function has two arguments for sorting the results, sort_by (taking values like "year", "author", and "title) and ascending (TRUE or FALSE).

Here's an example, to sort the results by title, in descending order.

res <- IEEE_search(list(au="Rabiner, L", title="Markov"),
                   sort_by="title", ascending=FALSE)
res$title

Technical details

Metadata limitations

The IEEE metadata has a number of limitations.

Authors' names may vary between records (e.g., Rabiner, L. vs. Rabiner, L.R. vs. Rabiner, Lawrence R.) Further, IEEE provides no ability to distinguish multiple individuals with the same name (c.f., ORCID).

Limit time between search requests

Care should be taken to avoid multiple requests to the IEEE Xplore Search Gateway in a short period of time.

The IEEER package institutes a delay between requests, with the time period for the delay configurable with the R option "IEEER_delay" (in seconds). The default is 3 seconds.

To reduce the delay to 1 second, use:

options(IEEER_delay=1)

Don't do searches in parallel (e.g., via the parallel package). You may be locked out from the IEEE Xplore Search.

Limit number of items returned

The IEEE Xplore Search Gateway returns only complete records (including the entire abstracts); searches returning large numbers of records can be very slow.

It's best to use IEEE_count() before IEEE_search(), so that you have a sense of how many records you will receive. If the count is large, you may wish to refine your query.

The limit argument to IEEE_search() (with default limit=10) limits the number of records to be returned. If you wish to receive more than 10 records, you must specify a larger limit (e.g., limit=100).

Make requests in batches

Even for searches that return a moderate number of records (say 2,000), it may be best to make the requests in batches: Use a smaller value for the limit argument (say 100), and make multiple requests with different offsets, indicated with the start argument, for the initial record to return.

This is done automatically with the batchsize argument to IEEE_search(). A search is split into multiple calls, with no more than batchsize records to be returned by each, and then the results are combined.

License and bugs

• License: MIT
• Report bugs or suggestions improvements by submitting an issue to the GitHub repository for IEEER.

ropensci/IEEER documentation built on May 18, 2022, 8:58 a.m.