TwitteR: 'searchTwitter' returns only a small set of tweets

Question

I am trying to recover ~ 3000 tweets with the keyword "nba" or hashtag "#nba" using the twitterR "searchTwitter" function, but it only returns 299 tweets for "nba" and 398 tweets for "#nba" between 2013-01-01 and 2014-02-25. I'm really confused, is this normal? Has anyone else encountered a similar problem using twitteR? Please help. Really appreciate!

library(twitteR)
library(plyr)
library(stringr)

load("~/twitter_authentication.Rdata")
registerTwitterOAuth(cred)

nbahash_tweets = searchTwitter("#nba",since='2013-01-01', until='2014-02-25',n=3000)

nba_tweets = searchTwitter("nba",since='2013-01-01', until='2014-02-25',n=3000)


Warning message:
In doRppAPICall("search/tweets", n, params = params, retryOnRateLimit = retryOnRateLimit,  :
  3000 tweets were requested but the API can only return 398

and then

Warning message:
In doRppAPICall("search/tweets", n, params = params, retryOnRateLimit = retryOnRateLimit,  :
  3000 tweets were requested but the API can only return 299

Answer 1

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