Automating book citation search

Question

I have a list of books listed by their titles in a text file. I want to write a script which can use a web service like Google scholar or amazon to search for the books and return me a xml or bibtex file with citation info for each book. Which programming tools can I use for this kind of automated search ?

Answer 1

Python would be my recommendation.

• Get names from the text file, simple file reading

• Construct a REST URL request to google's book API

  http://books.google.com/books/feeds/volumes?q=Elizabeth+Bennet&start-index=21&max-results=10

• Simple python code to get data from this URL (may need an API key, would advise using urllib2 with error handling rather than urllib)

Sample code,

 import urllib
 url = 'http://foo.api.request'
 data = urllib.urlopen(url).read()

• See the return schemas for this API (you can use the XML however you like).
• See BibTeXML for conversion between the two formats.

HTH