Acknowledgments

This book stands on a wide stack of free software. Particular thanks to the bookdown authors and the broader R Core and tidyverse communities; to the maintainers of openalexR, bibliometrix, igraph, tidygraph, ggraph, quanteda, stm, and tidytext for the packages this book relies on most; and to the OpenAlex project for making large-scale, open bibliographic data freely available.

Inspiration

The structural and pedagogical model for this book draws heavily on Mathias Harrer, Pim Cuijpers, Toshi A. Furukawa, and David D. Ebert’s Doing Meta-Analysis with R: A Hands-On Guide — both the book and its open-source repository at https://github.com/MathiasHarrer/Doing-Meta-Analysis-in-R. Their thorough, transparent, and beautifully laid-out bookdown setup — sidebar grouping, semantic callout boxes, the citation block, the dark/light toggle, MathJax-rendered formulas, downloadable BibTeX/RIS citations — set a clear standard for what a reproducible R-based research book can look like. Where the present book mirrors their conventions, it does so deliberately and gratefully. Where it diverges (colors, typography, individual icons), the divergence is cosmetic; the underlying craft is theirs to credit.

Use of LLM tools

Portions of this book were prepared with assistance from large language model tooling for narrowly defined, non-authorial tasks: copyediting, prose smoothing, LaTeX/Markdown formatting, scaffolding of boilerplate files (CI configs, CSS, build scripts), code refactoring, and citation lookup against verified DOIs. The tools used were the latest Mistral Le Chat model run locally via Ollama and the ollamar R package — all inference performed on local hardware, with no data sent to third-party services — and GitHub Copilot inside RStudio for code completion.

All scientific claims, methodological choices, data analyses, interpretations, and conclusions are the author’s own. No text generated by an LLM was incorporated without review and revision by the author. LLM tools were not used to generate, fabricate, or paraphrase cited sources; every reference was verified against its DOI, arXiv ID, or ISBN (see scripts/verify-citations.R).

This book was built by the bookdown R package.