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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

scopusflow 0.4.0

CRAN release: 2026-08-21

A release about reporting a search and about trusting the cache. The package now writes a search up as the reproducible record a systematic review has to publish, and a family of silent cache defects that served the wrong records is fixed.

Writing up a search

  • scopus_search_report() assembles the reproducible search-strategy record a systematic review has to report, from a harvest or from a plan not yet run. It prints as a readable report, formats as a methods paragraph fit to paste into a manuscript (format(report, style = "paragraph")), and writes as Markdown when file is supplied. It carries the database and platform, the field-wrapped query of every cell, the year limits, view, page size and paging mode, the date searched, the records retrieved against the number the API reported as matching, per-cell completeness, duplicates removed, the software versions, a runnable snippet that rebuilds the plan, and an explicit map of which PRISMA-S items the package can supply and which only you can. The reporting standard is PRISMA-S (Rethlefsen et al., 2021, Systematic Reviews, 10, 39), with the identification counts of the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram.

    Because the output is written for a published methods section, the report states only what the objects record. An absent retrieval time is never replaced by the current one, a completeness figure is never given for a harvest whose reported total is unknown, duplicates are counted only where a merge recorded removing them, and every unverifiable field says it is unrecorded, in words. Ten of the sixteen PRISMA-S items, among them peer review of the strategy, grey literature and any other database searched, are listed as yours to supply, since the package has no evidence for them.

  • scopus_fetch_plan() now carries the per-cell accounting onto its result, as the cell_totals attribute, and sums it into total_results when (and only when) every cell reported a total. A cell that comes back shorter than the API said it should now warns, which the Python twin has done since 0.3.0, and the warning text is byte-identical between the two. A cell stopped by max_results is short by request and does not warn.

  • scopus_combine() records the merge in the combined attribute: how many records went in, how many were kept, how many were removed and whether de-duplication ran. That count exists only at the moment of the merge, and PRISMA-S asks for it.

  • A retrieval also records how it was paged, as the paging attribute, since an offset-paged query stops at the API’s ceiling where a cursor-paged one does not.

Cache defects that returned the wrong records

All were silent, and all are fixed.

  • A year-partitioned plan could be served another plan’s years, because checkpoints were keyed by the cell’s position alone and every cell of such a plan carries the same query (the year travels separately, as the API’s date parameter), so the guard meant to reject a foreign checkpoint could not tell 2015’s from 2016’s. A plan over 2016:2017 pointed at a cache written by a plan over 2015:2016 returned the 2015 records and reported “loaded from cache”. Checkpoints are now named cell-NNN-YYYY.rds and carry a manifest (query, date, view, page size and record cap) that resume compares against. Existing caches become invisible and refetch once, which spends a little quota to buy back correctness.
  • A cell cached under a max_results cap was served to a later request asking for more. The manifest now records the cap and whether it actually bit, so a truncated checkpoint is a miss for a wider request while an untruncated one stays usable for any request. The Shiny app’s cache key gained the record cap and now hashes the query, where it used to truncate it at 80 characters, so two long queries sharing a prefix no longer share a directory.
  • A zero-row checkpoint answered for any query. The guard that recognises a foreign checkpoint reads the cached rows’ query column, which an empty cell has no rows to carry, and the manifest comparison never consulted its own copy of the query, so a plan that legitimately found nothing left a checkpoint that a different plan pointed at the same cache_dir would load as its own empty result. The manifest’s query must now match as well.
  • A failed abstract retrieval was checkpointed as if it were data. A rate-limited, server-error or offline attempt in scopus_abstract() degrades to an all-NA row so the batch survives, but that row was written to the cache, so a resumed run read the failure back from disk and never retried it. Only rows parsed from successful responses are checkpointed now.
  • Two identifiers could share one abstract checkpoint, because the cache filename reduces every non-alphanumeric character to _, so distinct identifiers such as 10.1/a.b and 10.1/a-b collide on the same file, and resume never asked which identifier a cached row belonged to. The cached row’s own id must now match, and a collision warns and refetches.
  • A checkpoint holding more records than the current max_results asks for is now served trimmed to that cap, with the fuller set left on disk for a later, wider request. The opposite direction, a checkpoint truncated below what is asked for, already refetched with a warning.

A rejected or damaged checkpoint now warns, where it used to be mentioned only under verbose, and checkpoints are written to a sibling temporary file and renamed into place, so an interrupted run can no longer leave a half-written file that breaks every later resume.

Other fixes

  • scopus_combine() handed the merged set one input’s own retrieval attributes. rbind() keeps those of its first argument, so the result inherited that harvest’s plan, cell_totals and total_results even though it held the rows of several, contradicting the documented promise that per-retrieval attributes are not carried over. A search record read off the inherited total then called the union of two harvests complete against a figure belonging to one of them. Only what survives a merge is kept now: the earliest retrieval time, every contributing version, the paging mode where the inputs agree, and the merge counts themselves.
  • The PRISMA 2020 identification block counted the records identified after de-duplication, so the two figures it gives could not both be right: the diagram subtracts the duplicates removed from the records identified to reach the records screened, and 138 identified less 11 removed is not the 138 rows the set holds. Where a merge recorded how many records went into it, that is now the identification count.
  • A plan not yet run was described in the past tense, and its date line said the set did not carry a retrieval time, when the truth was that no retrieval had happened.
  • average_comparison_percentage summed the numerator over years the denominator excluded, so a year with a missing reference count inflated it, giving a figure that contradicted the per-year shares printed beside it and that drives the topic ordering in plot_scopus_comparison(). It is now computed over the years where both counts are available.
  • scopus_abstract(include = "references") aborted the whole batch when one document’s response omitted its reference-count attribute. Because that arrived as a bare base error, untyped and so outside the scopus_error hierarchy, the per-identifier handler could not catch it, defeating the documented promise that one bad identifier does not lose a batch.
  • The app’s demo banner still called the demo data synthetic, which was true of the six invented rows that shipped before 0.3.0. Demo mode has replayed 138 real published articles since then, and only the topic comparison is simulated, so the banner now says which is which.
  • A record count past 2^31 was coerced to NA at three points, each of which accepted any finite whole number and then reached for a 32-bit integer. scopus_top(n = ) left head.data.frame() raising an untyped error about its own argument; scopus_fetch(max_results = ) and scopus_fetch_plan(max_results = ) turned every later n >= max_results into NA, so the retrieval died on a bare “missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed”; and the app’s reproducible-code panel wrote max_results = NA into a script it promises is runnable. All three now carry the value as a double, so a cap wider than the result set simply never bites, which is what the Python twin has always done. A cap that fits stays an integer.
  • The 5000-record cap warning fired even when max_results had already asked for fewer records than the ceiling, advising a remedy for a problem the caller did not have.
  • scopus_compare_topics() carries its counts as doubles, matching scopus_trend() and scopus_intersections(), so billion-scale totals no longer coerce to NA.
  • Every request carries a 60-second transfer timeout, tunable through getOption("scopusflow.timeout"), so a stalled connection cannot hang a session.
  • Retrievals record when they were taken and by which package version, as the retrieved_at and scopusflow_version attributes, preserved through the .rds round trip. Both are attributes, so the documented schema and the CSV round trip are unchanged.
  • Every text file the package writes now carries LF line endings on all platforms: the BibTeX and RIS exports, the DOI and record CSVs, and the app’s script and comparison downloads previously arrived with CRLF endings when written on Windows.
  • Every print() method now sends its whole output to standard output. The header line went through cli, which writes to the message stream, so capture.output() returned the table without its header, and a knitted document showed one printed object as two separate blocks.

Continuous integration and metadata

  • The dependency canary could finish green having exercised nothing, when no development head was actually installed. It now says so, in a warning and in the step summary, and it installs the ggplot2 development head alongside the Imports.
  • The declared dependency floors are now installed and tested by a min-deps job, and the check matrix reaches back to roughly R 4.3.
  • rlang’s floor is corrected to 1.1.0. The evidence for it is httr2 1.0.0’s own DESCRIPTION, which requires rlang (>= 1.1.0), so the old floor described a combination no user could have installed. It is CRAN-visible metadata.
  • The live API check’s documented request cost, the cache guard’s description in the documentation and vignette, and the path to the Python twin’s copy of the example records were all corrected.

scopusflow 0.3.0

A data and documentation release. The bundled corpus becomes a real harvest, and every example and article is rebuilt on it.

The bundled example records

The dataset the package ships for offline work was replaced outright.

  • example_records is now a worked example harvest of 138 real journal articles on graphene supercapacitors published between 2015 and 2024, carrying their real titles, DOIs, source titles, first authors and citation counts. It replaces the six invented records shipped previously.
  • The records are not a ‘Scopus’ harvest and are not described as one. The Elsevier API terms do not permit redistributing retrieved records, so they come from OpenAlex, whose metadata is released under CC0, reshaped into the schema [scopus_fetch()] returns. The reasoning is recorded in the design notes.
  • The harvest is complete, so the rows per year are the real publications per year for that query. Eleven records carry no DOI and two no source title, kept as they arrive because a real harvest has such gaps.
  • scopus_id is empty throughout, these records not having come from ‘Scopus’, so de-duplication falls back to the DOI as it does for any record whose identifier is missing.

Documentation

The material a reader meets was rebuilt on the new corpus, and one misleading fixture was replaced.

  • Every vignette and example runs on that corpus, paired with the key-gated live call a reader would write, and the figures quoted in the prose were recomputed against the new data.
  • The demo mode of run_app() draws on the same corpus, so a first look at the app opens on real articles, where it used to show invented rows.
  • The parser fixture in inst/extdata moves onto the reserved 10.5555 example prefix. It previously paired genuine, resolving DOIs with invented titles and authors, so a reader who checked one found a real paper mislabelled.
  • Every vignette now turns console colour off and fixes the console width while it renders. pkgdown enables colour for its own build, and the escape sequences were reaching the reader as literal text in the middle of the tables.
  • vignette("comparing-topics") shows one year of its illustrative comparison across every topic, in place of the whole table, and leaves out the query column, which in a real comparison holds the whole query string and so reads badly in a table.
  • The README no longer opens with a link to the documentation site, which on the site’s own home page pointed the reader at the page in front of them.

scopusflow 0.2.1

A documentation release. The vignettes now demonstrate several features that 0.2.0 shipped but did not show.

scopusflow 0.2.0

This release reaches further into the API, adds an analysis and export layer on top of a retrieval, and introduces a local, code-free app.

Deeper retrieval

A search now reaches further into the API, past the offset ceiling and beyond the fields the Search endpoint returns.

  • [scopus_fetch()] gains cursor = TRUE, cursor-based pagination that retrieves a whole large query without the 5000-record ceiling of offset paging. The warning on a query that exceeds the ceiling suggests this alongside partitioning with [scopus_plan()].
  • [scopus_fetch()] and [scopus_fetch_plan()] add an authkeywords column when view = "COMPLETE" is requested, at no cost beyond that view’s own smaller page size. The view = "STANDARD" output is unchanged, and [read_scopus_records()] keeps the column across a CSV round-trip.
  • [scopus_abstract()] retrieves the abstract and fuller metadata for one or many records from the ‘Scopus’ Abstract Retrieval API, resilient to an identifier that cannot be found. Through view and include = c("references", "keywords") it also retrieves a document’s own reference list, as a structured, per-citation data frame, and author keywords, with per-identifier caching keyed by the requested view and extras, an n_requests/quota attribute, and a clear, actionable error on an entitlement 403 that stops the batch, so the same failure is not repeated for every identifier. include = "keywords" without view = "FULL" is rejected up front, since the REF response carries no author keywords.
  • [scopus_corpus()] combines a search result with abstract retrieval into a minimal id/title/year/keywords/references shape for downstream tools such as keyword co-occurrence or citation-network analysis, without replacing [as_bibliometrix()]. A new vignette, Author keywords and references, walks through all of this with real DOIs.
  • [scopus_fetch_plan()] compares each checkpoint’s recorded query with the plan cell before loading it, refetching and overwriting the checkpoint on a mismatch, so two different plans pointed at the same cache_dir cannot serve each other’s records. A checkpoint that carries no query information (a zero-row cell, or one written by scopusflow 0.1.0) loads as before, and a cache directory is still best kept to a single plan.

Analysis and plots

The package gains a layer for summarising a literature and drawing the result.

  • [scopus_trend()] reports annual record counts for a query (the size of a literature over time), with [plot_scopus_trend()].
  • [scopus_top()] tallies the most frequent sources or authors in a record set, with [plot_scopus_top()], which draws whole-number axis breaks (so a tally of small counts shows no fractional ticks) and derives the count axis’s headroom from the widest end-of-bar label (so a wide count, say five figures on a top-authors bar, does not clip at the panel edge). An autoplot() method draws a record set’s publications per year.
  • [scopus_intersections()] counts a named set of concepts and any requested intersections of them, sizing where a study or a niche sits within the surrounding literature at one count request per row. Concept values that are already complete field-tagged expressions are used exactly as given, with no second wrap. [plot_scopus_intersections()] draws the result as a lollipop chart on a log-scale axis, with an autoplot() method and an optional highlight (for example the niche itself) whose legend label is derived from what is highlighted: ‘Focal intersection’ for intersections, ‘Focal concept’ for concepts and ‘Focal set’ for a mixture. An explicit highlight_label still wins.
  • [plot_scopus_comparison()] gains legend_inside. When set, and a legend is drawn, it is placed inside the panel in whichever corner has the most free space, on a small semi-transparent background, where the default places it above the panel. That default is unchanged.
  • [plot_scopus_comparison()] now spreads the direct line labels vertically so topics that converge near the final year no longer overlap, and falls back to a legend when there are too many topics to label legibly. The labels are spread when the figure is drawn, against the rendered text height, so they stay legible at any figure size, including a short panel such as the app’s result card. They carry no leader lines. The labels are colour-matched to their lines and spread in the same order as the line ends, so the link is clear without a leader that would otherwise cut across neighbouring labels.

Export

A retrieval can now leave the package in the formats other tools read.

  • [as_bibtex()] and [as_ris()] export a record set to the BibTeX and RIS interchange formats, so a search can be carried into Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley or a LaTeX bibliography.

A code-free app

The whole workflow is now available without writing any R.

  • [run_app()] launches a local, code-free Shiny app for building a search, retrieving records with a live progress terminal, and exporting them. A panel mirrors every choice as a runnable R script, so the app is an on-ramp to the package. It runs on your own machine, so the API key never leaves it. The app also has a Compare topics tab (with highlight, stability-band and counts-in-label controls, a per-term progress indicator, a quota estimate and a CSV export) and a Demo mode, on by default, that synthesises records and a comparison so the whole workflow can be explored with no key and no network. A new vignette, Using the code-free app, walks through every panel.
  • The app holds steady under stress. It refuses to start a comparison while a harvest is running, turns any comparison failure into a notification, floors a fractional maximum-records entry, drops duplicate comparison terms, and tells you when there is nothing to cancel.

Other improvements

One rough edge in the package’s messaging was smoothed.

  • The no-key error renders its guidance (the option name, the api_key argument and the key-request URL) through cli, where it used to leak raw markup.

scopusflow 0.1.0

CRAN release: 2026-06-20

First release.

  • Reproducible search plans with [scopus_plan()], and cheap sizing with [scopus_count()].
  • Quota-aware, paginated retrieval through [scopus_fetch()], with the largest page each view allows requested by default to keep request counts low, and resumable, cached, partitioned retrieval through [scopus_fetch_plan()].
  • A stable normalised record schema from [scopus_records()], with a summary() method that gives a quick overview.
  • DOI extraction and change tracking with [scopus_extract_dois()] and [scopus_diff_dois()].
  • Topic-trend comparison with [scopus_compare_topics()], and a plot from [plot_scopus_comparison()] or autoplot().
  • Interoperability and I/O through [as_bibliometrix()], [write_scopus_records()] and [read_scopus_records()].
  • A reference to the common ‘Scopus’ field tags in [scopus_field_tags()], a safe query composer in [scopus_query()], and a bundled [example_records] dataset for offline exploration.
  • Safe merging of record sets with [scopus_combine()] (and a c() method), plus as_tibble() and as.data.frame() coercion.
  • A typed condition system (scopus_error and its subclasses) and quota-header parsing with [scopus_quota()].
  • The comparison plot uses whole-number year breaks, a colour-blind-safe palette, direct line labels, an optional highlight argument and a shaded Wilson stability band (an illustrative range, switchable with interval).
  • The bundled example_records spans several disciplines, and the examples and five workflow vignettes draw on a wide range of fields.
  • The authors column retains every author a record lists. Very large result totals are handled without overflow, and DOI cleaning copes with www.doi.org hosts and DOI: labels.