Welcome to scirate documentation!

This package provides a Python interface for the Scirate website.

Dependencies

This package depends on the following packages:

  • bs4
  • lxml
  • requests

They can be installed using pip.

sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

If you want to contribute to this package, you will need the nose package as well.

Installation

The preferred way to install the scirate package is via pip

sudo pip install scirate

Alternatively to install, you may also run the following command from the top-level package directory.

sudo python setup.py install

Examples

This package provides a Python interface for interfacing with the Scirate website. Here are a few examples demonstrating how to access data on Scirate.

Clients

In order to interface with the content on Scirate, we start off my creating a client. This client will be responsible for requesting information from Scirate and will serve as the intermediary for requesting and obtaining data.

from scirate.client import ScirateClient

client = ScirateClient()

Papers

Let us access a paper on Scirate via the arXiv identifier. Say we want to access information via Scirate on the following listing 1509.01147.

We can grab some of the basic information, such as the authors, title, abstract, arXiv category, etc.

>>> from scirate.paper import SciratePaper
>>> paper = client.paper("1509.01147")
>>> "The Information Paradox for Black Holes"
>>> paper.authors
>>> ['S. W. Hawking']
>>> paper.abstract[0:50]
>>> "I propose that the information loss paradox can be"
>>> paper.category
>>> "hep-th"

We can also grab some of the more Scirate-specific metrics. Such as the number of scites for a given article, who scited the article, etc.

>>> paper.scites
>>> 6
>>> paper.scitors
>>> ['Andrew Childs', 'Jonny', 'Mehdi Ahmadi', 'Noon van der Silk', 'Ryan L. Mann', 'Tom Wong']

Consult the documentation for further examples of information that can be obtained from a paper.

Authors

You can get information about an author as well.

>>> from scirate.author import ScirateAuthor
>>> author = client.author("Terrance", "Tao", "math.CO")
>>> author
>>> "Terrance Tao"
>>> author.papers[0]
>>> "An inverse theorem for an inequality of Kneser"
>>> author.arxiv_ids[0]
>>> "1711.04337"

Using the arXiv identifier along with what we did in the Papers section, we can obtain further information about that paper if we wish

>>> paper = client.paper(author.arxiv_ids[0])
>>> paper.scites
>>> 0

Note that the mathematician Terrance Tao published on multiple arXiv categories. We can look up his papers under the math.NT category as well.

>>> author = client.author("Terrance", "Tao", "math.NT")
>>> author.papers[0]
>>> "Long gaps in sieved sets"
>>> author.category
>>> math.NT

Categories

One may also wish to look at papers under various arXiv identifier listings on Scirate. For instance, one may wish to find all of the papers posted under the ‘quant-ph’ category posted on September 7, 2017.

>>> from scirate.category import ScirateCategory
>>> category = client.category("quant-ph", "09-07-2017")
>>> category.papers[0:2]
>>> ['Quantum Advantage from Conjugated Clifford Circuits', 'Extended Nonlocal Games from Quantum-Classical Games']

Contribution

If you find an API method that is not supported by this package, feel free to create a Github issue. Also, you are more than welcome to submit a pull request for a bug fix or additional feature.