ScopusScrapus - A small utility for the Scopus Search API

Elsevier is kind enough to make its database of scientific papers accessible through a web API. This small Python module allows you to access it programatically with Python.

Documentation for the Scopus Search API is available here: http://api.elsevier.com/documentation/SCOPUSSearchAPI.wadl Documentation on how to construct then search queries is here: http://api.elsevier.com/documentation/search/SCOPUSSearchTips.htm

Installation

The little ScopusScrapus package is available on PyPi, and it can be easily installed:

pip3 install ScopusScrapus

Usage

To use the Scopus Search API (and all other APIs provided by Elsevier) require an API key to use. To get one you should visit their Devlopers site here: http://dev.elsevier.com/index.html.

To run a scopus search query looking for papers mentioning 'arctic' in their title, abstract or keywords and that were published between 2008 and 2009, you do the following:

from ScopusScrapus import ScopusSearchQuery

params = {'query':'TITLE-ABS-KEY(arctic)', 'date':'2008-2009'}
ssq = ScopusSearchQuery(key,params)
# Key is your API key, and params is a dictionary
# containing your query and other fields.
# optionally, a timeout parameter can be passed to the constructor. It should contain a number of seconds after which the query will be aborted if no response has been received from the scopus api. In this case, an exception requests.exceptions.ReadTimeout will be raised
# The default parameters are:

defaultParams = {'count':100,
    'view':'COMPLETE'}

# The complete view can only be seen by entities
# subscribing to scopus so make sure to override it
# in your params dictionary if you are not.

Once the ScopusSearchQuery object has been created you can iterate through it as a normal iterator:

for paper in ssq:
    print(str(paper))

Each result has the normal Scopus Search API format.