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?

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke Sometimes the changes we release on Europe PMC are not immediately obvious! For the last few months we’ve been working hard to migrate our search to a technology called Solr.

Prompted by the appearance on the BHL blog of an article about BioStor I've thinking about how to improve what is basically a fairly clunky tool. One major weakness is searching the collection of nearly 40,000 articles extracted from BHL. Note the word "extracted." BioStor isn't a tool like PubMed or Google Scholar where the goal is to find articles on a topic.