Count Authors

setwd("D:/a")

options(stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

TrimWhiteSpaces <- function(x) {
      out <- sub("^[[:space:]]*(.*?)[[:space:]]*$", "\\1", x, perl=TRUE)
}

df <- read.csv("Authors.csv", skip = 1, nrows = 201)[, -1]

df1 <- strsplit(df, ";")

# (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5531471/combining-unequal-columns-in-r)
# but this is not necessary, better to use "unlist" 
# df2 <- sapply(df1,'[', seq(max(sapply(df1,length))))

# see G. Valbusa r-rante
df2 <- unlist(df1)

df2 <- TrimWhiteSpaces(df2)
df2 <- toupper(df2)

df3 <- as.data.frame(table(df2))

df3 <- df3[order(df3$Freq), ]
df3