Utilizing R for Quantitative Literature Reviews
Some questions related to Literature Searches are best answered through quantitative analysis compared to a traditional manual literature review. An example of this might be wanting to describe the authorship (country of origin) and institutional contribution to a specific journal, such as the WHO Bulletin.
The traditional method for analyzing a journal would either be to have direct access to the publisher database, or to manually quantify the many references related to the literature search.
However, R has several packages for directly interfacing to PubMed. This allows, the literature search query to have the results sent directly into the R Statistical Language. Once in R, simple queries can be conducted to quantify topics such as author country, author institution, year of publication, publication type, etc.