The rate of scientific publication over the past several decades has gone from bendy straw to fire hose. The question for science communicators is how can they effectively search existing literature, discover new trends, and make sense of the impact new discoveries are having? Luckily much of this data is freely available on the web. Users just need the tools to access and process what's coming through the fire hose. rOpenSci (http://www.ropensci.org) is a group devoted to providing people with the tools to access open data. Within the R environment we have developed a series of packages that can help users search scientific literature and metadata. Our session will teach users how to download and search scholarly metadata or fulltext (for open publications like PLOS) and text mine it to tame the fire hose of publications and visualize text data. We will also cover how to download impact measurements from various article-level metrics providers. A basic working knowledge of R is a prerequisite.
Limit 24
Register for Open Data workshop here.
