Matching Medline/PubMed data with Web of Science: a routine in R language

We present a novel routine, namely medlineR, based on the R language, that allows the user to match data from Medline/PubMed with records indexed in the ISI Web of Science (WoS) database. The matching allows exploiting the rich and controlled vocabulary of medical subject headings (MeSH) of Medline/PubMed with additional fields of WoS. The integration provides data (e.g., citation data, list of cited reference, list of the addresses of authors' host organizations, WoS subject categories) to perform a variety of scientometric analyses. This brief communication describes medlineR, the method on which it relies, and the steps the user should follow to perform the matching across the two databases. To demonstrate the differences from Leydesdorff and Opthof (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(5), 1076-1080), we conclude this artcle by testing the routine on the MeSH category "Burgada syndrome."