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Import book and article references from a public Google Scholar profile by ID.

Source: R/ReadGS.R
ReadGS.Rd

This function will create a BibEntry object for up to 100 references from a provided Google Scholar ID, if the profile is public. The number of citations for each entry will also be imported.

Usage

ReadGS(
  scholar.id,
  start = 0,
  limit = 100,
  sort.by.date = FALSE,
  .Encoding = "UTF-8",
  check.entries = BibOptions()$check.entries
)

Arguments

scholar.id

character; the Google Scholar ID from which citations will be imported. The ID can by found by visiting an author's Google Scholar profile and noting the value in the uri for the “user” parameter.

start

numeric; index of first citation to include.

limit

numeric; maximum number of results to return. Cannot exceed 100.

sort.by.date

boolean; if true, newest citations are imported first; otherwise, most cited works are imported first.

.Encoding

character; text encoding to use for importing the results and creating the bib entries.

check.entries

What should be done with incomplete entries (those containing “...” due to long fields)? Either FALSE to add them anyway, "warn" to add with a warning, or any other value to drop the entry with a message and continue processing the remaining entries.

Value

An object of class BibEntry. If the entry has any citations, the number of citations is stored in a field ‘cites’.

Details

This function creates BibTeX entries from an author's Google Scholar page. If the function finds numbers corresponding to volume/number/pages of a journal article, an ‘Article’ entry is created. If an arXiv identifier is found, a ‘Misc’ entry is created with eprint, eprinttype, and url fields. Otherwise, a ‘TechReport’ entry is created; unless the entry has more than ten citations, in which case a ‘Book’ entry is created.

Long author lists, long titles, and long journal/publisher names can all lead to these fields being incomplete for a particular entry. When this occurs, these entries are either dropped or added with a warning depending on the value of the check.entries argument.

Note

Read Google's Terms of Service before using.

It is not possible to automatically import BibTeX entries directly from Google Scholar as no API is available and this violates their Terms of Service.

See also

BibEntry

Examples

if (interactive() && !httr::http_error("https://scholar.google.com")){
  ## R. J. Carroll's ten newest publications
  ReadGS(scholar.id = "CJOHNoQAAAAJ", limit = 10, sort.by.date = TRUE)

  ## Matthias Katzfu\ss
  BibOptions(check.entries = "warn")
  kat.bib <- ReadGS(scholar.id = "vqW0UqUAAAAJ")

  ## retrieve GS citation counts stored in field 'cites'
  kat.bib$cites
}