ACM Digital Library access with R - No API so how possible?

Question

I want to search ACM Digital library using R code, retrieving at least metadata including abstracts, and at best the full text.

I know that the rOpenSci libraries provide R packages and functions to access IEEEExplore and other literature data services and that these work quite well, but because ACM Digital Library does not yet provide an API, its not been possible for rOpenSci to develop code to access ACM Digital Library resources from R.

My question is does anyone know a way around this? Are there alternatives that allow programmatic access to the content in ACM Digital Library?

Thanks Sam

Answer 1

I promised a code example for searching the ACM digital library with rcrossref.

install.packages('rcrossref')
library(rcrossref)

data = cr_members(member_id = 320, limit = 500, works = TRUE, query = "games")
df = data.frame(data$data)
df$container.title
df$title
table(df$type)

Thanks sckott.

But my problem is that:

data$meta

shows a total results of around 2637 when dl.acm.org shows about 133,279.

I did find a page that said ACM was participating in a pilot - so perhaps they haven't yet put the whole database into crossref.

And yes - no abstracts- bummer. But there are links to full text in XML.