Kay Cichini recently wrote a word-cloud R function called GScholarScraper on his blog which when given a search string will scrape the associated search results returned by Google Scholar, across pages, and then produce a word-cloud visualisation. This was of interest to me because around the same time I posted ... [Read more...]

This is a followup to a post I uploaded earlier today about web scraping data off Google Scholar. In that post I was frustrated because I’m not smart enough to use xpathSApply to get the kind of results I wanted. However fast-forward to the evening whilst having dinner with ... [Read more...]

I wanted to scrape the information returned by a Google Scholar web search into an R data frame as a quick XPath exercise. The following will successfully extract  the ‘title’, ‘url’ , ‘publication’ and ‘description’.  If any of these fields are not available, as in the case of a citation, the ... [Read more...]

Google slightly changed the html code it uses for hyperlinks on search pages last Thursday, thus causing one of my scripts to stop working. Thankfully, this is easily solved in R thanks to the XML package and the power and simplicity of XPath expressions: Lovely jubbly! P.S. I know ... [Read more...]