Compiled: 2023-12-12
The ‘grantpubcite’ package uses httr to interact with the NIH Reporter and iCite APIs. The package was developed using devtools, and documented using roxygen. Vignettes (‘articles’) are processed by knitr and rmarkdown. Vignettes use ggplot2 and plotly for figures, visNetwork for network visualization, and DT for interactive tables. The package web site is made with pkgdown using GitHub actions to update on push. These are really amazing packages!
The original ‘inspiration’ for the work came from an email chain referencing the following article about incentives for academic software development (ironically not available without a subscription)
- Merow, C., Boyle, B., Enquist, B.J. et al. Better incentives are needed to reward academic software development. Nat Ecol Evol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02008-w
The email made me wonder about ‘standard’ academic incentives, particularly the grant / publish / cite / grant / … cycle that funds wet-lab programs. The ITCR seemed to offer a different perspective, and the NIH Reporter / iCite data some ‘hard’ and programatically accessible metrics.
Package development relied on previous knowledge I’d learned from Philippa Doherty and Tau Liu about grant-funded publications and citations, and Kayla Interdonato about DT / datatable. The package benefited greatly from public development, e.g., with different commentators pointing out that I’d originally missed almost 1/2 the ITCR-funded programs and then that I’d got them all.
There are other relevant packages. repoRter.nih provides a very nice interface to the NIH Reporter project search api, and includes functions that help the user formulate queries; the vignette is really well done, and I should probably have used this package instead of writing my own code. The iCiteR package provides a mechanism to query iCite. It also looks like a good package, but has recently been archived on CRAN and does not appear to be actively maintained.
The package and case studies have been fun to develop! Now I just need a hex sticker…