Sciencer Toolkit

A smarter way to find articles.

About - Usage - Roadmap - Contributing

Collectors - Expanders - Filters - Providers

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About

Sciencer Toolkit enables researchers to programmatically conduct a literature review using an intuitive yet flexible interface.

At its core, Sciencer collects sets of papers. The initial set of papers is created through the use of Collectors (e.g. paper doi, author name). Then, Sciencer iteratively finds new papers using Expanders (e.g. authors, citations, references). Finally, new found papers need to satisfy a series of Filters in order to be accepted into the current set. Being iterative in nature, Sciencer allows you to repeat the above steps has many times as you'd like.

This project was motivated by the absence of tools to automate systematic reviews using clear and well-defined criteria. Still, for literature reviews that do not need to follow specific criteria, there are a several tools that can help to discover new papers.

Usage

# Create the Sciencer Core Component
sciencer = Sciencer()

# Define provider
sciencer.add_provider(SemanticScholarProvider())

# Define collectors
## this collector will gather all known papers authored by "John Doe" into de set
sciencer.add_collector(sciencer.collectors.CollectByAuthorID("John Doe"))
## this collector will collect the paper with DOI "1234567890" into the set
sciencer.add_collector(sciencer.collectors.CollectByDOI("1234567890"))
## this collector will collect the papers with 
sciencer.add_collector(sciencer.collectors.CollectByTerms(["Term 1", "Term 2", "Term 3"]))

# Define expanders
## this expander will gather all known papers written by authors in the current set.
sciencer.add_expander(sciencer.expanders.ExpandByAuthors())
## this expander will gather all the referenced papers
sciencer.add_expander(sciencer.expanders.ExpandByReferences())
## this expander will gather all the cited papers
sciencer.add_expander(sciencer.expanders.ExpandByCitations())

# Define filters
## this filter will reject papers that were published before 2010 and after 2030
sciencer.add_filter(sciencer.filters.FilterByYear(min_year=2010, max_year=2030))
## this filter will reject all the papers that do not have the word social on the abstract
sciencer.add_filter(sciencer.filters.FilterByAbstract("social"))
## this filter will reject all the papers that do not have the field of study Computer Science
sciencer.add_filter(sciencer.filters.FilterByFieldOfStudy("Computer Science"))

# Run one iteration
results = sciencer.iterate()

For more examples on how to use the Sciencer toolkit, please check the directory examples/.

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Collectors

Name	Description	Parameters
Author ID	Collects all the papers written by an author	Authors's SemanticScholar ID
Paper DOI	Collects a paper by its DOI	Paper's DOI
Terms	Collects papers by terms	Query Terms Maximum Number of Papers

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Expanders

Name	Description
Authors	Expands a paper by its authors
References	Expands a paper by its references
References	Expands a paper by its citations

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Filters

Name	Description	Parameters
By Year	Filters a paper by its year	The lowest acceptable year (inclusive) The highest acceptable year (inclusive)
By Abstract Words	Filters a paper by its abstract	The collection of words the abstract should include (at least one)
By Field Of Study	Filters a paper by its field of study	The field of study the paper should have

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Providers

Name	Provider	Features
Semantic Scholar	Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API	Search by Author (Name, S2ID) Search By Paper ID (S2ID, DOI, ArXiv, MAG, ACL, PubMed, Corpus)
DBLP	DBLP Search API	Work in Progress

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Roadmap

• Create Paper's and Author's Cache
• Add Bulk Expanders (to avoid redundancy)
• Add support for multithreading
• Add Collectors
  • Add Collect by Venue/Proceedings
• Add Expanders
  • Add Expand by Citations
  • Add Expand by References
  • Add Expand by Venue/Proceedings
• Add Filters
  • Add Filter by Number of Citations
  • Add Filter by Topic
  • Add Filter by Keywords
• Add Compound Filters
• Add utility to write results to a *.csv

See the open issues for a full list of proposed features (and known issues).

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Contributing

Want to add a new provider, filter or expander? Looking to improve the core functionality of sciencer toolkit. We look forward to include your contributions in the toolkit! If you have a suggestion that would improve the toolkit just send us a Pull Request!

If you are looking for an additional collector/filter/expander/provider or just want to report a bug, you can also simply open an issue with the tag "enchament" or "bug", respectively.

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