Dear Silvio!..

R-Code to produce this nice gif-animated greeting card can be viewed HERE.

Webscraping Google Scholar & Show Result as Word Cloud Using R

NOTE: Please see the update HERE and HERE!

...When reading Scott Chemberlain's last post about web-scraping I felt it was time to pick up and complete an idea that I was brooding over for some time now:

When a scientist aims out for a new project the first thing to do is to evaluate if other people already have come along to answer the very questions he is about to work on. I.e., I was interested if there has been done any research regarding amphibian diversity at regional/geographical scales correlated to environmental/landscape parameters. Usually I would got to Google-Scholar and search something like - intitle:amphibians AND intitle:richness OR intitle:diversity AND environment OR landscape - and then browse thru the results. But, this is often tedious and a way for a quick visual examination would be of great benefit.

A Little Webscraping-Exercise...

In R it's quite easy to pull out anything from a webpage and I'll show a little exercise in doing so. Here I retrieve all blog addresses from R-bloggers by the function readLines() and some subsequent data processing.

Import dbf to R, Manipulate Strings with grep & sub Function

Here's a set of historical species presence records of a certain geographical region (data-link). I wanted to manipulate / simplify strings (species names) and get an overview of the data. 

...The tasks were to split genera and epitheta, to exclude species with specific strings included and to get rid of unwanted text (author names). For graphical presentation of the species record history I did a plot with segments indicating the first and last year of a species record: