Analysis of PubMed search results using R by Pilar Cacheiro.
From the post:
Looking for information about meta-analysis in R (subject for an upcoming post as it has become a popular practice to analyze data from different Genome Wide Association studies) I came across this tutorial from The R User Conference 2013 – I couldn´t make it this time, even when it was held so close, maybe Los Angeles next year…
Back to the topic at hand, that is how I found out about the RISmed package which is meant to retrieve information from PubMed. It looked really interesting because, as you may imagine,this is one of the most used resources in my daily routine.
Its use is quite straightforward. First, you define the query and download data from the database (be careful about your IP being blocked from accessing NCBI in the case of large jobs!) . Then, you might use the information to look for trends on a topic of interest or extracting specific information from abstracts, getting descriptives,…
Pliar does a great job introducing RISmed and pointing to additional sources for more examples and discussion of the package.
Meta-analysis is great but you could also be selling the results of your queries to PubMed.
After all, they would be logging your IP address, not that of your client.
Some people prefer more anonymity than others and are willing to pay for that privilege.