Introduction I never thought that I’d be programming software in my career. I startedusing R a little over 2 years now and it’s been one of the most importantdecisions in my career. Secluded in a small academic office with no oneto discuss/interact about my new hobby, I started searching the web fortutorials and packages. After getting to know how amazing and nurturingthe R community is, it made me want to become a data scientist.

The problem Text-mining - the art of answering questions by extracting patterns, data, etc. out of the published literature - is not easy. It’s made incredibly difficult because of publishers. It is a fact that the vast majority of publicly funded research across the globe is published in paywall journals.

FAIR data is increasingly accepted as a description of what research data should aspire to; F indable, A ccessible, I nter-operable and R e-usable, with Context added by rich metadata (and also that it should be Open). But there are two sides to data, one of which is the raw data emerging from say an instrument or software simulations and the other in which some

Nearly 4 years ago I wrote on this blog about an R package solr for working with the database Solr. Since then we’ve created a refresh of that package in the solrium package. Since solrium first hit CRAN about two years ago, users have raised a number of issues that required breaking changes. Thus, this blog post is about a major version bump in solrium.What is Solr?

elastic is an R client for Elasticsearch elastic has been around since 2013, with the first commit in November, 2013.What is Elasticsearch? If you aren’t familiar with Elasticsearch, it is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine.It’s similar to Solr. It falls in the NoSQL bin of databases, holding data in JSON documents, insteadof rows and columns.

Excited to annonunce a new package called charlatan. While perusingpackages from other programming languages, I saw a neat Python librarycalled faker. charlatan is inspired from and ports many things from Python’shttps://github.com/joke2k/faker library. In turn, faker was inspired fromPHP’s faker,Perl’s Faker, andRuby’s faker. It appears that the PHPlibrary was the original - nice work PHP.Use cases What could you do with this package?

Should you cite preprints in your papers and should journals allow this? This is a topic that gets debated periodically. The most recent round of Twitter debate started last week when Martin Hunt pointed out that the journal Nucleic Acids Research wouldn’t allow him to cite them. A couple of days later I suggested that journals that don’t allow citing preprints are putting their authors’ at risk by forcing them not to cite relevant work.

The Weecology lab group run by Ethan White and Morgan Ernest at the University of Florida is seeking a Data Analyst to work collaboratively with faculty, graduate students, and postdocs to understand and model ecological systems. We’re looking for someone who enjoys tidying, managing, manipulating, visualizing, and analyzing data to help support scientific discovery.

The Weecology lab group run by Morgan Ernest and Ethan White at the University of Florida is seeking a post-doctoral researcher to study changes in ecological communities through time.

We are very exited to announce a major new release of the Data Retriever, our software for making it quick and easy to get clean, ready to analyze, versions of publicly available data. The Data Retriever, automates the downloading, cleaning, and installing of ecological and environmental data into your choice of databases and flat file formats.