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Paperboy

Info:See github for the latest source
Author: Andy Casey, [email protected]

Paperboy is a script that will find peer-reviewed papers published by authors at a given institute in a given timeframe. A summary report including the first page of each article is produced, which can be emailed to someone on the first month so that new papers can be published on an institute noticeboard.

Requirements

Installation

No installation required, but you may want to edit the file so that you're finding papers for your own institute. Right now it's set to find papers published by anyone from *Mount Stromlo Observatory* or *Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics*, at the Australian National University

Feel free to change the following lines in paperboy.py:

HOST = "mso.anu.edu.au"
FROM_ADDRESS = "Paperboy"
ADMIN_ADDRESS = "[email protected]"
INSTITUTE_QUERY = [
  "*mount stromlo observatory*", # or
  "*research school of astronomy and astrophysics*"
]

Note: Each time you run Paperboy the ADMIN_ADDRESS will get an email too.

Usage Examples

  • Create a summary report for all the papers that were published last month.

    python paperboy.py --to [email protected] --month last

  • Email a summary report for all the papers that have been published this month:

    python paperboy.py --to [email protected] --month this

  • Email a summary report for all the papers published between 8/2011 and 4/2012

    python paperboy.py --to [email protected] --month 8 --year 2011 --end_month 4 --end_year 2012

  • More options are available, and help is found by using:

    python paperboy.py --help

Set up a Cron job

At the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, ANU we have an automatic cron job on the system which finds new peer-reviewed papers for the previous month on the first of each month. You just need someone to volunteer to print out the summary pages and pin them up on some common noticeboard. In this case let's call that person 'Louise'. First, follow these instructions and when I do crontab -l in a terminal I get the following output:

acasey@magnificent:/home/acasey>crontab -l
# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 7 1 * * python /home/acasey/paperboy/paperboy.py --month last --to [email protected] --interval 10 --repeat 10

So you can see at 7 am on the first of every month, Louise will get a summary email for all the papers published in the last month.

Note: Louise does this at ANU, and we're thankful. To limit spam, that's not her real email address :-)

Important Notes

Although NASA ADS is free to search, this script will go and retrieve articles wherever it can. If a published version of the paper is unavailable it will use arXiv pre-prints instead if available. However, it does assume that you are using this code from an institutional site and that you have access to all of the online astronomy journals.