getpaper

description

getpaper is a small command-line tool writen in python to get scientific papers from their references. It uses the journals' search engine, automatically send to them a well formatted request, and scraps the answer (using BeautifulSoup) to get the paper url. If a paper is found, it opens its url on a new tab in the web browser. If there is an error, it opens the paper search page.

example

# general synthax :
$ getpaper PRA 46 2668
$ getpaper Nature 519 211
$ getpaper arxiv 1706 07781

# get paper using DOI :
$ getpaper doi 10.1103/physrevx.8.031054

to get the list of implemented journal :

getpaper journals # returns list of journals

available journals : PRL, PRX, RMP, PRA, PRB, PRC, PRD, PRE, PR, Science, NatPhys, Nature, arxiv, NJP, JPBold, JPB, OE, OL, AO, Optica, SPP, SciPostPhys

limitations

So far, on top of broadband journals such as Nature or Science and the open-access arXiv repository, only a subset of physics journals is implemented.

Note that the papers are fetched from journals' search engine using web scrapping and some quick retro-engineering. If the search engine request protocol and/or the result page changes, the code won't work anymore. If this happens for an implemented journal, do not hesitate to let me know by opening an issue :)

If you wish to contribute, by writing the code in a more elegant way or implementing new journals, do not hesitate to contact me.

notes

The script is written for python 2.7. It requires the installation of additionnal packages:

• requests: "Python HTTP for Humans." Used to send requests to the journal's search engine and retrieve information.

• beautifulsoup4: "Beautiful Soup sits atop an HTML or XML parser, providing Pythonic idioms for iterating, searching, and modifying the parse tree." Used to parse the HTTP response.

For a simple install of this packages, I recommend using pip (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip/).