Write the comparison before choosing filters
Use a concrete exploratory question: how are requests for social-science evidence framed in AskSocialScience during two adjacent weeks? Treat the opening post as the unit and decide whether a question without an explicit research citation still qualifies. This decision belongs in the collection brief before anyone sees the results. It prevents the team from quietly changing the meaning of a case after finding a striking example in one week.
Write the planned start and end in the brief before requesting data. The API accepts from and to as YYYY-MM-DD UTC days, including the whole final day. If your research question uses a local calendar, document its conversion to UTC. The API has no intraday date filter. Where a local day crosses UTC boundaries, a broader UTC-day retrieval followed by local timestamp checks can organize the work, without proving complete coverage.
An event mentioned inside a post need not have happened on the post's creation date. Distinguish those dates during interpretation. The independent historical archive offers no complete coverage, update schedule or immutable snapshot guarantee. It cannot establish that all relevant voices were captured. Do not use the first received timestamp as the beginning of a community's history or the last received timestamp as proof that an event ended.
Give each week explicit UTC bounds
Start with GET https://api.redditcollector.com/v1/posts?subreddit=AskSocialScience&limit=3, then add &from=2025-03-01&to=2025-03-07 for the first illustrative window. Use from=2025-03-08&to=2025-03-14 for the second and restart at page=1. These dates specify a proposed exercise, not known archive coverage. Both filters use YYYY-MM-DD in UTC and include the entire to day. The homepage request alone has no date restriction. Keep the route, community and inclusion rule constant while changing the two date bounds.
Send X-API-Key: <key> or Authorization: Bearer <key> from your server. The Get API key page explains signup before payment. In a private local journal, record the actual route, effective dates, community, page, limit and retrieval time without the key. Add any q, author or min_score choice with its rationale. q is text search; min_score is a numeric threshold, not a quality or sentiment classifier.
Keep retrieval rules separate from research coding
First inspect wording without q or min_score. If the protocol later requires q, remember that it searches title and text: the terms must match together within a matching field, not be split between title and body. min_score only filters by a threshold; it does not rank by merit or recency. Keep a local column for your research code and a separate reason for exclusion. Neither is a label supplied by the archive.
Validate the HTTP response and preserve the original data, pagination and credits before cleaning text. When present, compare created_utc against the documented window. Record missing fields and exclusions separately. Source timestamps can help test your inclusion rule; they do not independently certify authorship, authenticity or the date of a described event. If the question needs full discussion context, state that flat records and available parent_id or link_id cannot guarantee it.
Declare the stopping point
Content limit and page each run from 1 to 100, with one page per request. _doc is an internal document order, not chronological or relevance sorting. Advancing a page therefore does not advance a time watermark. Predetermine a request budget and stopping rule. Splitting dates or locally removing repeated identifiers helps organize a collection but does not guarantee an exhaustive or unique set of records.
Read total with relation: eq is an exact query total, gte a lower bound and unknown no reliable total, possibly null. Save has_more and window_exhausted when returned. An empty deeper page can have unknown total; do not turn it into proof of zero historical activity. /v1/subreddits accepts prefix and limit only, without page or date filters, and cannot establish that a community has records for your intended week.
Every successful retrieval costs a credit, including empty pages and repeats: $1 per 1000, with a $50 minimum paid top-up for 50000 credits. Conditional trial credits are not a guaranteed research allowance. Invalid requests do not debit and upstream failures refund reservations; client response loss may follow billed success. Local rejection of an out-of-scope record does not refund the request. Use documentation and pricing to budget attempts, and distinguish HTTP 400, 401, 402 and 429. /v1/status confirms HTTP responsiveness only.
Leave a methods note that another researcher can read
Write the final account of collection around decisions: why these two weeks, why opening posts, which filters were used and why the run stopped. Keep received counts separate from accepted cases and report missing timestamps or context. Equal date lengths and equal request budgets do not make either set representative. A difference in retrieved themes is a finding about the material examined, not proof of a change in the whole community.
Finish the journal with received files, processing decisions, exclusions and the limits of the available material. Use your saved responses to repeat local coding, rather than promising identical future retrieval. A defensible report distinguishes the planned period from observed timestamps and archive availability. Respect applicable laws and third-party rights when storing, quoting or sharing research material; access to the API does not decide those obligations.
