Global Research Identifier Database (GRID) - Institutional data in R

This package provides data access to some curated data from GRID (https://grid.ac) which can be downloaded and migrated into a SQLite database format.

Details

This dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Public Domain 1.0 International licence.

It is used by for example Altmetric, Dimensions, Figshare and others.

A local SQLite db is created based on a distribution of institutional data from https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/30895309

It is created by extending the remotely distributed dataset to support Full Text Search and this extended database is then exposed in through this package through a couple of functions by way of tibbles.

The idea is to show how to provide access to a potentially larger database and how to enable use of in-built full text search capabilities in SQLite by downloading potentially big remote data and installing it locally using https://rdrr.io/cran/rappdirs/

This can be relevant if you are considering to release a package to CRAN that provides access to datasets to R and you also want to follow the general recommendation from the CRAN checks that "package data should be smaller than a megabyte" thus avoiding having to argue separately with the CRAN maintainers for making an exception to this rule (see details at: http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/data.html#data-cran).

With this approach, your package can stay small. There are a few minor practical drawbacks - mostly that your package will initially not work off-line until at least one initial successfull call to download the data has been made using institutions_download which would require a connection to the Internet.

The upside is being able to tap into things like Full Text Search for datasets and with this approach the package can stay small and pass the CRAN checks without requiring exceptions, while the dataset size is only limited to 2TB (an SQLite limitation).