The R package rtweet does a great job to connect R to Twitter. Unless you’re looking at the past 7 days, Twitter offers two additional API (with different syntax).
If you access Twitter archives with rtweet and have a Premium subscrption on Twitter, the current version of rtweet sends requests in batches of n=100, but Premium (currently) allows batches up n=500. This means, you use 5 requests where 1 would suffice. Kevin Taylor has provided a fix for this, which he also mentioned in the issues of rtweet. Using the fix is easy (much easier than the description in issues thread suggests):
library(devtools)
install_github("kevintaylor/rtweet")
This will replace any installed version fo rtweet. You probably want this version if you’re on Twitter Premium; for the free Sandbox, n=100 is correct. Perhaps this is why rtweet has not implemented the fix yet?
Image credit: CC-by-nc by diarnst
Didier Ruedin 