You can interact with Plantminer in two ways:
Regardless of how you use Plantminer, the information that you get back will have come from either The Plant List or Tropicos. Please cite them accordingly.
To submit a list, just go to the homepage, enter your email, and click the "Go" button. You don't need to register a user anymore.
Before you submit a list, please make sure it is a plain text file, with one entry per line. You can leave authors and other kind of information after the species name, but they will be removed prior to processing and will not be in the returned list.
Click here to get a small zip file containing a list before and after processing.
After a while, depending on how big your list is, you will receive your list at the address you entered. This list will be in a tab-delimited .csv file with several fields, most self-explanatory. If a species was not matched, Plantminer will do its best to give a reasonable suggestion (column "suggestion"). Moreover, if an entry is a synonym of another species, the accepted name will be given if there is enough (also in the column "suggestion").
When you submit a list or make a call to a method, you will get a response organized this way:
For more information about the sources, status, and confidence level, please head to The Plant List and Tropicos.
If you have logged in to the system, you will see an api key in the top-right corner. This is the key you will need to make calls to the service. A valid api call looks like this:
www.plantminer.com/method/genus/species?key=your_key
The method can be 'search', if you want to get a summary of a given species and 'suggest', if you want Plantminer to give you the closest name suggestion. More valid calls:
www.plantminer.com/search/miconia?key=your_key
www.plantminer.com/search/miconia/albicans?key=your_key
www.plantminer.com/suggest/mrcya/lingua?key=your_key
By using the web services you can, for instance, populate a database directly from R. Here is an example script.