/ads-paperboy-ioa

A monthly script to find and summarise papers published by astrophysicists at the University of Cambridge.

Primary LanguagePython

Installation

Clone this repository using this terminal command:

git clone git@github.com:andycasey/ads-paperboy-ioa.git paperboy
cd paperboy/

Setting up your Python installation

This code was written for Python version 2.7 due to the dependency requirements. You can set your preferred Python flavour as version 2.7 on the IoA computers by adding the following command to the .profile file in your home directory:

module load python/2.7

Some Python packages will be installed to your home directory, so in the same .profile file you should add this line after the module load python/2.7 line:

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/hurnm/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages

After these lines have been added, either open a new terminal or enter source ~/.profile in your current terminal window.

Installing required Python packages

The code requires a few custom Python packages which can be installed with the following terminal command:

pip install ads PyPDF2 --user

Getting an ADS key

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) has an Application Programmer Interface (API) which allows us to run programmatic queries against their database. This service puts load on the ADS servers, and therefore could be overloaded by unscrupulous users making too many requests. Therefore you will need to get a unique API token from ADS. We will use that token for all of the requests we make to ADS.

Here is how to get an API key from ADS:

  1. Sign up for an account on the newest version of ADS.

  2. Log in to your new account and navigate to API Token, and then click Generate a new key.

  3. Create a folder called .ads (the dot is necessary) in your home directory and create a new file in the .ads folder called dev_key. Save your generated key to the dev_key file.

Run the script

Now you should be able to run the paperboy_ioa.py script using the following terminal command:

python paperboy_ioa.py

This should produce some output to the terminal, and send an email with the papers published from the previous month. You can also specify the year and month to search. For example:

python paperboy_ioa.py 2014 8

Will search for papers published by IoA researchers in the month of August, 2014.

Set up a monthly Cron job to run the script automatically

At a terminal, type:

crontab -e

And enter in the following line:

0 7 1 * * /opt/ioa/software/python/2.7/bin/python <YOUR_FOLDER>/paperboy_ioa.py > <YOUR_FOLDER>/paperboy.log

Then the code will run at 07:00 AM on the first day of every month. The <YOUR_FOLDER> expression above refers to the folder location where this script lives on your local system.