scholarly

scholarly is a module that allows you to retrieve author and publication information from Google Scholar in a friendly, Pythonic way without having to solve CAPTCHAs.

Installation

scholarly can be installed either with conda or with pip. To install using conda, simply run

conda install -c conda-forge scholarly

Alternatively, use pip to install the latest release from pypi:

pip3 install scholarly

or pip to install from github:

pip3 install -U git+https://github.com/scholarly-python-package/scholarly.git

We are constantly developing new features. Please update your local package regularly. scholarly follows Semantic Versioning. This means your code that uses an earlier version of scholarly is guaranteed to work with newer versions.

Optional dependencies

• geckodriver or chrome-driver provide the browser capabilities that may be needed to fully utilize the library. Installing at least one of geckodriver or chrome-driver if you need to fetch the complete list of co-authors from an author's profile. If neither installed, scholarly will fetch only up to 20 co-authors.

  To install geckodriver, download the latest version from their Github repo and the executable should be in the system path. Follow the appropriate installation instructions: macOS | Ubuntu | Windows

  To install chrome-driver, download the ChromeDriver binary for your platform and include its location in the PATH environment variable. See their getting-started page for instructions. Alternatively, if you are on Ubuntu, you can run scripts/setup-chrome-ubuntu-latest.sh to install the latest version of ChromeDriver.

• Tor:

  scholarly comes with a handful of APIs to set up proxies to circumvent anti-bot measures. Tor methods are deprecated since v1.5 and are not actively tested or supported. If you wish to use Tor, install scholarly using the tor tag as

  pip3 install scholarly[tor]

  Note: Tor option is unavailable with conda installation.

Tests

To check if your installation is succesful, run the tests by executing the test_module.py file as:

python3 test_module

or

python3 -m unittest -v test_module.py

Documentation

Check the documentation for a complete API reference and a quickstart guide.

Examples

from scholarly import scholarly

# Retrieve the author's data, fill-in, and print
# Get an iterator for the author results
search_query = scholarly.search_author('Steven A Cholewiak')
# Retrieve the first result from the iterator
first_author_result = next(search_query)
scholarly.pprint(first_author_result)

# Retrieve all the details for the author
author = scholarly.fill(first_author_result )
scholarly.pprint(author)

# Take a closer look at the first publication
first_publication = author['publications'][0]
first_publication_filled = scholarly.fill(first_publication)
scholarly.pprint(first_publication_filled)

# Print the titles of the author's publications
publication_titles = [pub['bib']['title'] for pub in author['publications']]
print(publication_titles)

# Which papers cited that publication?
citations = [citation['bib']['title'] for citation in scholarly.citedby(first_publication_filled)]
print(citations)

IMPORTANT: Making certain types of queries, such as scholarly.citedby or scholarly.search_pubs, will lead to Google Scholar blocking your requests and may eventually block your IP address. You must use proxy services to avoid this situation. See the "Using proxies" section in the documentation for more details. Here's a short example:

from scholarly import ProxyGenerator

# Set up a ProxyGenerator object to use free proxies
# This needs to be done only once per session
pg = ProxyGenerator()
pg.FreeProxies()
scholarly.use_proxy(pg)

# Now search Google Scholar from behind a proxy
search_query = scholarly.search_pubs('Perception of physical stability and center of mass of 3D objects')
scholarly.pprint(next(search_query))

scholarly also has APIs that work with several premium (paid) proxy services. scholarly is smart enough to know which queries need proxies and which do not. It is therefore recommended to always set up a proxy in the beginning of your application.

Disclaimer

The developers use ScraperAPI to run the tests in Github Actions. The developers of scholarly are not affiliated with any of the proxy services and do not profit from them. If your favorite service is not supported, please submit an issue or even better, follow it up with a pull request.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from you. Please create an issue, fork this repository and submit a pull request. Read the contributing document for more information.

Acknowledging scholarly

If you have used this codebase in a scientific publication, please cite this software as following:

@software{cholewiak2021scholarly,
  author  = {Cholewiak, Steven A. and Ipeirotis, Panos and Silva, Victor and Kannawadi, Arun},
  title   = {{SCHOLARLY: Simple access to Google Scholar authors and citation using Python}},
  year    = {2021},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.5764801},
  license = {Unlicense},
  url = {https://github.com/scholarly-python-package/scholarly},
  version = {1.5.1}
}

License

The original code that this project was forked from was released by Luciano Bello under a WTFPL license. In keeping with this mentality, all code is released under the Unlicense.