ACM Digital Library access with R - No API so how possible?

Question

I want to search ACM Digital library using R code, retrieving at least metadata including abstracts, and at best the full text.

I know that the rOpenSci libraries provide R packages and functions to access IEEEExplore and other literature data services and that these work quite well, but because ACM Digital Library does not yet provide an API, its not been possible for rOpenSci to develop code to access ACM Digital Library resources from R.

My question is does anyone know a way around this? Are there alternatives that allow programmatic access to the content in ACM Digital Library?

Thanks Sam

Arraign

They are in the Crossref API, see their member info here api.crossref.org/members/320, and could get list of articles with api.crossref.org/members/320/works. I don't think they provide any links to full text in that API, but most publishers dont. Does this publisher have OA articles? Do they provide XML? Can you give eg of a URL for an article. – Izabel

If they are indexed in Pubmed that's one way to get at fulltext, but I don't see any of theirs in their so far – Izabel

OK Great - I'll look into crossref further (rOpenSci has a package for them). In answer to your questions - yes I believe they have a small number of OA articles, but mostly they would be pay to view (like IEEEExplore). Not sure about XML - I don't believe they have an API yet. Here is an example link to a page: dl.acm.org/… – Arraign

I've been able to search for the ACM paper I just linked to from here: crossref.org by title. Therefore I believe the R code will probably work. I'll post an example if I can get it to work. Thanks for your help. – Arraign

I don't see any abstracts in the metadata from crossref for this publisher. I'll ask around to see if they're avail. anywhere else – Izabel

Answer 1

I promised a code example for searching the ACM digital library with rcrossref.

install.packages('rcrossref')
library(rcrossref)

data = cr_members(member_id = 320, limit = 500, works = TRUE, query = "games")
df = data.frame(data$data)
df$container.title
df$title
table(df$type)

Thanks sckott.

But my problem is that:

data$meta

shows a total results of around 2637 when dl.acm.org shows about 133,279.

I did find a page that said ACM was participating in a pilot - so perhaps they haven't yet put the whole database into crossref.

And yes - no abstracts- bummer. But there are links to full text in XML.

Arraign