Scrape the number of citations on pubmed

pubmedCites.R

scrapePub <- function(sp){
    
  Sys.sleep(2)
  spString <- tolower(gsub(' ', '+', sp))

  url <- paste0('http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%22', spString, '%22')


  page <- html(url)
  
  try({
  refs <- page %>%
            html_node('.result_count') %>%
            html_text() %>%
            strsplit(' ') %>% 
            .[[1]] %>%
            .[length(.)] %>%
            as.numeric()
  })
  return(refs)
}

scrapePub('Myotis myotis')