Using the ‘rentrez’ R Package to Identify Repository Records for NCBI LinkOut

In this article, we provide a brief overview of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) LinkOut service for institutional repositories, a service that allows links from the PubMed database to full-text versions of articles in participating institutional repositories (IRs). We discuss the criteria for participation in NCBI LinkOut for IRs, current methods for participating, and outline our solution for automating the identification of eligible articles in a repository using R and the ‘rentrez’ package. Using our solution, we quickly processed 4,400 open access items from our repository, identified the 557 eligible records, and sent them to the NLM. Direct linking from PubMed resulted in a 17% increase in web traffic.