R Observatory: Metrics for citationchaser version 0.0.4

Balamuta, James Joseph

doi:10.5281/zenodo.21843040

citationchaser

0.0.4Package record

Perform Forward and Backwards Chasing in Evidence Syntheses

0packages depend

3.9Kdownloads / year

–test coverage

9/13flavors OK

Overview

About

Maintained by Neal HaddawayCRAN page ↗

In searching for research articles, we often want to obtain lists of references from across studies, and also obtain lists of articles that cite a particular study. In systematic reviews, this supplementary search technique is known as 'citation chasing': forward citation chasing looks for all records citing one or more articles of known relevance; backward citation chasing looks for all records referenced in one or more articles. Traditionally, this process would be done manually, and the resulting records would need to be checked one-by-one against included studies in a review to identify potentially relevant records that should be included in a review. This package contains functions to automate this process by making use of the Lens.org API. An input article list can be used to return a list of all referenced records, and/or all citing records in the Lens.org database (consisting of PubMed, PubMed Central, CrossRef, Microsoft Academic Graph and CORE; https://www.lens.org).

Install

R (CRAN)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)

install.packages("citationchaser", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-citationchaser

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled. We list this channel from recorded r2u download activity rather than from a live index of the repository, so treat it as last known rather than guaranteed.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-citationchaser

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

Health

CRAN checks

4NOTE9OK

Check messages

NOTECRAN incoming feasibilityr-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-clang, r-devel-linux-x86_64-debian-gcc

Maintainer: ‘Neal Haddaway <nealhaddaway@gmail.com>’

Package CITATION file contains call(s) to old-style citEntry().  Please
use bibentry() instead.

NOTEdependencies in R coder-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-clang, r-devel-linux-x86_64-fedora-gcc

Namespace in Imports field not imported from:
  ‘networkD3’
All declared Imports should be used.

CRAN check page ↗

Slowest check: 2.4 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Status changes

NOTE9 OK, 4 NOTE2026-06-09
ERROR9 OK, 3 NOTE, 1 ERROR2026-06-08
NOTE9 OK, 4 NOTE2026-05-02
ERROR7 OK, 4 NOTE, 1 ERROR2026-04-25
NOTE10 OK, 4 NOTE2026-03-10

Advisories

none known

How this is measured·How advisories are found

Documentation

In release 0.0.4

READMEYes · 291 wordsVignettesNoNEWSNoCitation fileYes · cites a publicationWebsitenot declared in DESCRIPTION

Help pages: 3
Examples that run: 0%2 never run
Exported functions with examples: 100%
Documented parameters: 100%
Return-value docs: 100%
Help pages citing references: 0%

How these are measured

Downloads

3.9K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #9,903 · ~11/day · ~323/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

33830 days

1K90 days

3.9K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on100 r2u52 c2d4u

How downloads are counted

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

11 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Installing citationchaser adds 99 packages (52 with compiled code, 93 MB of source tarballs). Heaviest: stringi 11 MB, ggformula 6.0 MB, ggplot2 6.0 MB.

Depends (1)

R >= 2.10

Imports (10)

dplyr httr jsonlite maditr MESS networkD3 scales tibbleutilsdata.table

LinkingTo (0)

none

Suggests (2)

knitr rmarkdown

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

0direct

0indirect

Nothing depends on this yet.

How these are counted

Code & Tests

Datasets

People & History

People (3)

Neal Haddaway

Author, Maintainer since 0.0.4 (2022)

Matthew Grainger

Contributor

Charles Gray

Contributor

Releases (1)

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
0.0.4Latest
record
2022-01-27 · current release
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18

Package metadata

First published: 2022-01-27
Total releases: 1 / 4 yrs
License: GPL (>= 3) OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 2.10
Download size: 221 KB

Appears in task views

Meta-Analysis

Cite

Cite this package

Run in R for the authors' entry:

citation("citationchaser")

The package provides a citation file, so citation() returns the authors' own entry.

It points to 10.5281/zenodo.4543513.

Cite the R Observatory

For a number measured here: a download total, a coverage figure, an archival date.

Format

APA

Balamuta, J. J. (2026). R Observatory: Metrics for citationchaser version 0.0.4 [Data set]. HJJB, LLC. Data release v2026-10-25. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21843040

From data release v2026-10-25, which the citation names so these numbers can be found later. More on citing and the projects behind them.

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