1 Nov 2011

Webscraping Google Scholar & Show Result as Word Cloud Using R

NOTE: Please see the update HERE and HERE!

...When reading Scott Chemberlain's last post about web-scraping I felt it was time to pick up and complete an idea that I was brooding over for some time now:

When a scientist aims out for a new project the first thing to do is to evaluate if other people already have come along to answer the very questions he is about to work on. I.e., I was interested if there has been done any research regarding amphibian diversity at regional/geographical scales correlated to environmental/landscape parameters. Usually I would got to Google-Scholar and search something like - intitle:amphibians AND intitle:richness OR intitle:diversity AND environment OR landscape - and then browse thru the results. But, this is often tedious and a way for a quick visual examination would be of great benefit.

The code I present will solve this task. It may be awkward in places and there might be a more effective way to yield the same result - but it may serve as a starter and I would very much appreciate people more literate than me picking up the torch...

For my example-search it is shown that there has not been very much going on regarding amphibian diversity correlated to environment and landscape...

See code HERE.

PS: I'd be happy about collaboration / tips / editing - so feel free to contact me and I will add you to the list of editors - you then could edit / comment / add to the script on Google Docs.

...some drawbacks need to be considered:
  • Maximum no. of search results = 100
  • Only titles are considered. Additionally considering abstracts may yield more representative results.. but abstracts are truncated in the search result and I don't know if it is possible to retrieve the full abstracts.
  • Also, long titles may be truncated...
  • A more illustrative result would be achieved if one could get rid of all other words than nouns, verbs and adjectives - don't know how to do this, but I am sure this is possible.
  • more drawbacks? you tell..

11 comments :

  1. Neat! That will definitely be useful.

    Why do you omit the PDF entries?

    Tom

    p.s., [FYI for others] The PDF entries can be included along with articles, books, and citations by the following modification:
    corpus <- Corpus(DataframeSource(result[, 1:3]))
    =>
    corpus <- Corpus(DataframeSource(result[, 1:4]))

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  2. Thanks Tom,

    of course pdfs should be included - my mistake..

    Best,
    Kay

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  3. This is great. I whined previously about there being no easy ways to scrape Google Scholar: http://bmb-common.blogspot.com/2011/02/does-google-scholar-suck-or-am-i-just.html -- but maybe this starting point will get me off my butt to try to help improve the tools

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  4. I very much appreciate your compliment and hope for improvements to the script (see the drawbacks I added recently to the post).

    Best,
    Kay

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  5. Very cool idea. I hope you/others will take this further :)

    BTW, have a look at this:
    http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=2624

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  6. Thanks Tal,

    ..very interesting link! - Drew's work is really impressive: what he says about word clouds is absolutely true. His approach to beef up the word cloud concept is slick..

    Best,
    Kay

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  7. Hi Kay,

    I also encourage you to go through the comments on Drew's post - most interesting.

    BTW, any chance you'd wrap your code as a function?

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  8. I'm afraid my time resources are too scarce these days... But I would also would like to see this being continued.

    (..Maybe there are some helping hands?)

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  9. Running your code I get a warning:

    webpage <- readLines(url)
    Warnmeldung:
    In readLines(url) :
    unvollständige letzte Zeile in 'http://scholar.google.com/scholar?

    Any Idea?

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  10. ..the last line obviously causes some trouble - but as it holds nothing we need we can ignore the warning.

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  11. I wish Google could implement a word cloud for filtering searches. I'll try it building up on your script, by using the identify() function to get the word clicked and then re-fetch the Google search by adding the word with a "-" sign in front of the word in the query to exclude results containing this word. Should work...

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