Since November last year, quite a lot has been going on in altmetrics and various tools supporting their use. Of course, new research articles has been authored and published, too.
A while ago, RStudio launched ShinyApps.io, a hosted version of RStudio Shiny Server Pro. A very promising way to deploy Shiny applications. As for now, the company kindly offers free beta accounts (EDIT 11.3.2015 ShinyApps.io is now on a production state, and the maximum number of applications on a free account like mine, is five. Therefore, I’ve had to deactive the app featured in this posting). Here is an application a screenshot showing Aalto University publications since 2010 with a DOI.
Article metadata and the Web of Science (WoS) score come from Thomson Reuters, and altmetrics data via the Altmetric API. All data is pre-fetched, so the values may differ from those you find on their site. To get hold on Altmetric data, a nice and easy way to query their API in R, is the rAltmetric library by rOpenSci.
For those of you with access to a local R installation, you can also run the app with some sample data from a GitHub Gist by the command runGist("5df86b664b840c5927f9").
Shiny 0.9 came out with many useful novelties, e.g. integration of the selectize.js JavaScript library. With that, you can now start typing in the empty select box, and Shiny will instantly deliver matching items.
There are two plots in the app, made with ggplot2 and rCharts (NVD3), respectively. I had also in mind to try ggvis, a brand new visualization package from RStudio, but failed to plug it in the reactive context. Maybe next time!
The R code is here.
