Extracting Country Name from Author Affiliations

Question

I am currently exploring the possibility of extracting country name from Author Affiliations (PubMed Articles) my sample data looks like:

Mechanical and Produc

Answer 1

One way could be to split your strings in order to isolate geographical information (for example by deleting everything up to the first coma), and then submit the result to a geocoding service.

For example, Google geocoding API allows to send an address and to get back a localization and the corresponding geographical informations, such as the country. I don't think there is a ready-made R package to do it, but you can find some functions here, for example :

Geocoding in R with Google Maps

There are also extensions in other languages such as Ruby :

http://geokit.rubyforge.org/

It also depends on the number of observations you have, the free Google API for example is limited to about 200 adresses / IP / day, if I remember correctly.