The interest in text as data has seen a sharp increase in the past few years, mostly due to the advent of methods for automated text analysis. At the same time, researches within the field of scientometrics have analysed citations and other aspects of the scholarly literature with great sophistication. The archival content of JSTOR offers a rich and diverse set of primary sources like research articles or book chapters for both approaches. Data for Research (DfR) by JSTOR gives all researchers, regardless of whether they have access to JSTOR or not, the opportunity to analyse metadata, n-grams and, upon special request, full-text materials about all available articles and books from JSTOR. The package jstor [@jstor] helps in analysing these datasets by enabling researchers to easily import the metadata to R [@r_core], a task, for which no other integrated solution exists to date.
The metadata from DfR can either be analysed on their own or be used in conjunction with n-grams or full-text data. Commonly, metadata from DfR include information on the articles’ authors, their title, journal, date of publishing, and quite frequently all footnotes and references. All this information can be of interest for specific research questions. For the analysis of n-grams or full-texts, the metadata imported with jstor allow the researchers to filter articles based on specific journals, the dates of publication, the authors, keywords in titles and other aspects.
jstor provides functions for three main tasks within the research process:
- Importing different parts of metadata, either from XML-files or directly from the .zip-archive provided by DfR.
- Importing n-gram and full-text files.
- Performing common tasks of cleaning metadata like unifying the journal id or cleaning page numbers.
Full documentation of jstor, including a comprehensive case study about analysing n-grams from DfR, is available at https://ropensci.github.io/jstor/. The package can be obtained from CRAN (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=jstor) or from GitHub (https://github.com/ropensci/jstor). Archived versions of all releases are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1169861).
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Jason Becker and Elin Waring for their helpful requests during package review. Benjamin Klebel, Antonia Schirgi and Matthias Duller provided helpful comments and requests for clarifications when writing the case study.
Work on jstor benefited from financial support for the project “Academic Super-Elites in Sociology and Economics” by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), project number “P 29211 Einzelprojekte”. jstor is currently being used by the project team to analyse academic elites in sociology and economics.