rECEsearch

A simple Python project to grab Google Scholar data for research at UBC.

Requirements

• Python
• scholarly (in lieu of a Google Scholar API)
• Data, in the form a csv file

Example CSV data:

Lab,                      ID,           URL
Biomedical Technologies,  ZImFmCUAAAAJ, http://ece.sites.olt.ubc.ca/research/biomedical-technologies/
Communication Systems,    PhdzKFcAAAAJ, http://ece.sites.olt.ubc.ca/research/communication-systems/

(Do not include the spaces if you choose to use this data.)

Virtual environment quick start (for Windows):

pip install virtualenv
virtualenv env
source ./env/Scripts/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip freeze > requirements.txt

N.B.: As of July 10th, 2020 you should manually tweak the scholarly package to get the desired output from research.py

There's an open issue for this, but for now go to env/Lib/scholarly/author.py and change line 10 to read:

_CITATIONAUTH = '/citations?hl=en&user={0}&sortby=pubdate'

The "sortby=pubdate" is what we're after here.

And, as of August 8th, 2020 you should manually tweak one more thing

In _scholarly.py change line 85 to contain:

patents: bool = False

Patents should be skipped for this use case.

Usage

Run python research.py -i <input file> -o <output file>, where 'input file' is the name of a CSV file containing professor names. See research.py for more information on the anticipated structure of the CSV data. In general, your input file should have three columns: lab, lab ID, and a URL (in that order).

• 'Lab' should be the name of the lab at UBC
• 'Lab ID' should be the Google Scholar ID. For example, if you navigate to this link you want the user=... part of the link, so in this case the ID is EmD_lTEAAAAJ.
• 'URL' should be the homepage this content is displayed on the UBC website. As of right now, this field is not utilized, so don't worry about it to much.

After executing the command, an output CSV file is produced.

• 'Lab' and 'Lab ID' are the same as above
• 'Publications' is a kind-of placeholder for an arbitrary amount of rows (like a file tree); the publication information is printed in the next N rows with the following (rather self-explanatory) headers:
  • 'Title'
  • 'Author'
  • 'Year'
  • 'Cited by' (the number of other publications that have cited the give publication)
  • 'Publisher'

Example

Here's an example console call:

And then here would be the generated csv (converted to a Markdown table):

Lab	Lab ID	Publications	Title	Author	Year	Cited By	Publisher
Biomedical Technologies	ZImFmCUAAAAJ	...
			Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy	Daniel J Klionsky an	2016	8739	Taylor & Francis
			On robust Capon beamforming and diagonal loading	Jian Li and Petre St	2003	1431	IEEE

Or, in Excel:

Future

Collect research from more sources, export to RSS feed.