Google scholar is tracking statistics such as citation counts for authors and papers. However, it only provides the number of total current citations, as well as the total citations of the current and past year. As someone who likes to watch lines go up, this was not enough fine grained info for me.
Knowing that google scholar updates its stats page every second day, I have thus created this neat little tool to track the citation and citation index progression of my own and my colleagues' and co-authors' work. I am very aware, that this is nothing else but a private d***k measuring contest ;)
For now, I will let this tool run every second day and auto-commit stats as a cron job on a raspberry pi sitting at home.
In the near future, there will be an extension for tracking paper info (for all authors?). This will probably require some more sparse data logging, to avoid an explosion of text data.
At some later time, once enough dated data points have been gathered, I will add functionality to draw some neat lines.
First, clone this repo. Then, call bash install.sh, which in turn will install all required packages via pip.
The tool can then be neatly used from command line. The following help text should be self-explanatory:
$ python main.py --help
Usage: main.py [OPTIONS]
This script collects author information on google scholar and writes the
respective current reference count to a dated list. This allows for a more
fine-grained tracking of citations compared to the yearly/current overview
provided by google scholar itself.
Options:
-a, --authors TEXT The name or google scholar id of the authors to
track on google scholar. Multiple uses
possible.
-al, --author_list TEXT Should point to a file of newline-character-
separated author names or ids. Multiple uses
possible
-o, --output_directory TEXT Output directory of the stats to collect. A
file will be created or appended to, named
after the authors' google scholar ids.
-d, --dry_run Set this flag to only collect data without
writing. Prints the collected data to the
terminal instead. Author search by name also
prints the profile picture to console.
-fa, --fetch_async Set this flag to fetch author data
asynchronously from the web. Default behaviour
is sequential processing.
-c, --commit Set this flag to auto-add and commit any change
in the given output directory to your CURRENT
BRANCH and local git.
-k, --keep_log Set this flag to keep the scholar.log and
geckodriver.log created by scholarly
--help Show this message and exit.
I personally am running the tool, as a cron job, as
python3 main.py -al authorlists/fhg-hhi-authors.txt -al authorlists/coauthors.txt -o /some/location -c -fa
When running with -d or --dry_run, author information is collected, but not written to disk. Instead the author info is shown for, e.g., making sure the right author has been identified, in case of author name ambiguites.
