semanticscholar

The goal of semanticscholar is to offer data access to data from Semantic Scholar through their lightweight API which can provide data on publications and authors. Semantic Scholar is a free, non-profit academic search and discovery engine whose mission is to empower researchers.

Installation

You can install the current version of semanticscholar from GitHub with:

#install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("kth-library/semanticscholar", dependencies = TRUE)

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to get information for papers and authors:

library(semanticscholar)
library(dplyr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'dplyr'
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
#> 
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union
suppressPackageStartupMessages(library(purrr))
library(knitr)

# get a paper using an identifier
paper <- S2_paper("arXiv:1705.10311", include_unknown_refs = TRUE)

# authors on that paper
authors <- paper$authors

# for one of the authors
author_ids <- authors$authorId
author <- S2_author(author_ids[1])

# get just paper count, citation count and hIndex for a specific author
countz <- S2_author2(author_ids[1], fields = "url,paperCount,citationCount,hIndex")
countz %>% dplyr::as_tibble()
#> # A tibble: 1 × 5
#>   authorId url                                   paperCount citationCount hIndex
#>   <chr>    <chr>                                      <int>         <int>  <int>
#> 1 3324024  https://www.semanticscholar.org/auth…         31          1127     12

# for a specific paper, get the TLDR;

S2_paper2(identifier = "649def34f8be52c8b66281af98ae884c09aef38b", fields="tldr")$tldr$text
#> [1] "This paper reduces literature graph construction into familiar NLP tasks, point out research challenges due to differences from standard formulations of these tasks, and report empirical results for each task."

# list some of the papers
papers <- 
  author$papers %>% 
  select(title, year)

papers %>% head(5) %>% knitr::kable()

title	year
Artificial Intelligence Distinguishes COVID-19 from Community Acquired Pneumonia on Chest CT	2020
Optimal Multiple Surface Segmentation With Shape and Context Priors	2013
Optimal Co-Segmentation of Tumor in PET-CT Images With Context Information	2013
Error-Tolerant Scribbles Based Interactive Image Segmentation	2014
Automated anatomical labeling of coronary arteries via bidirectional tree LSTMs	2018

# get data from several identifiers for importing into Zotero
ids <- c("10.1038/nrn3241", "CorpusID:37220927")
my_refs <- zotero_references(ids)

# this data can now be imported via the Zetero API using https://github.com/giocomai/zoteroR
# showing data form the first record
my_refs[[1]]$journalArticle %>% glimpse()
#> Rows: 1
#> Columns: 6
#> $ title            <chr> "The origin of extracellular fields and currents — EE…
#> $ DOI              <chr> "10.1038/nrn3241"
#> $ URL              <chr> "https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da82f8e6ff0094…
#> $ abstractNote     <chr> "Neuronal activity in the brain gives rise to transme…
#> $ publicationTitle <chr> "Nature Reviews Neuroscience"
#> $ date             <int> 2012
my_refs[[2]]$creators %>% knitr::kable()

creatorType	firstName	lastName
author	G.	Kawchuk
author	N.	Prasad
author	R.	Chamberlain
author	A.	Klymkiv
author	L.	Peter

Rate limits and endpoints

By default the rate limit allows 100 request per 5 minute period. This allows for making new requests every 3-4 seconds.

By requesting an API key from Semantic Scholar, this rate can be faster, such as 100 requests per second. If you want to use an API key provided by Semantic Scholar, then edit the ~/.Renviron file to add the key as a value for an environment variable SEMANTICSCHOLAR_API. This R package will then use API endpoints which are faster, with higher rate limits than the regular API endpoints.

The rate limit and API base URL endpoint can be verified:

S2_api()
#> [1] "https://partner.semanticscholar.org/"
S2_ratelimit()
#> [1] 0.01010101

Data source attribution

When data from semanticscholar is displayed publicly, this attribution also needs to be displayed:

Data source: Semantic Scholar API https://partner.semanticscholar.org/?utm_source=api