getpapers

Get metadata, fulltexts or fulltext URLs of papers matching a search query using any of the following APIs:

• EuropePMC
• IEEE
• ArXiv
• Crossref (metadata, no fulltext)

getpapers can fetch article metadata, fulltexts (PDF or XML), and supplementary materials. It's designed for use in content mining, but you may find it useful for quickly acquiring large numbers of papers for reading, or for bibliometrics.

Installation

Installing nodeJS

Please follow these cross-platform instructions

Installing getpapers

$ npm install --global getpapers

Usage

Use getpapers --help to see the command-line help:

    -h, --help                output usage information
    -V, --version             output the version number
    -q, --query <query>       search query (required)
    -o, --outdir <path>       output directory (required - will be created if not found)
    --api <name>              API to search [eupmc, crossref, ieee, arxiv] (default: eupmc)
    -x, --xml                 download fulltext XMLs if available
    -p, --pdf                 download fulltext PDFs if available
    -s, --supp                download supplementary files if available
    -t, --minedterms          download text-mined terms if available
    -l, --loglevel <level>    amount of information to log (silent, verbose, info*, data, warn, error, or debug)
    -a, --all                 search all papers, not just open access
    -n, --noexecute           report how many results match the query, but don't actually download anything
    -f, --logfile <filename>  save log to specified file in output directory as well as printing to terminal
    -k, --limit <int>         limit the number of hits and downloads
    --filter <filter object>  filter by key value pair, passed straight to the crossref api only
    -r, --restart             restart file downloads after failure

By default, getpapers uses the EuropePMC API.

Screenshot

Query formats

Each API has its own query format. Usage guides are provided on our wiki:

• EuropePMC query format
• IEEE query format
• ArXiv query format
• Crossref API [Crossref docs]

License

Copyright (c) 2014 Shuttleworth Foundation Licensed under the MIT license

Caveats

• The remote site may timeout or hang (we have found that if EPMC gets a query with no results it will timeout).
• Be careful not to download the whole site. use the -k option to limit downloads (this should be a default).