Semantic Scholar Citation Graph Builder

Semantic Scholar citation graph builder - allows to build a graph that includes all citations and (if specified) also references for all papers of an author given the Semantic Scholar author ID.

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NOTE 1 Semantic Scholar: 1) may not have all information of an author's works, 2) tends to have noisy data - author data scattered around multiple author entries and multiple different authors may be merged under one author ID. So ... be transparent about these points when comparing data!

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NOTE 2 Be polite! Semantic Scholar allows 100 requests per 5 minutes. If you do not want to get banned, do not increase the request frequency (and do not execute the requests in parallel)!

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NOTE 3 I differentiate between self-citations, co-author citations, and other citations! I define a co-author as someone who has co-authored with the author at least one paper and not as someone who is a co-author of a specific paper when analysing that particular paper's citations.

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Build Instructions

The code is written in C#. You will need Visual Studio or an alternative (C# capable) development environment to compile and use the code.

You may need Visual Studio 2019 or newer to compile the code.

Usage Instructions

In order to use the citation-graph-builder, first you need to acquire an author ID. Go to https://www.semanticscholar.org/, find the author you are interested in, open his/her profile, and copy the multi-digit number that comes after the author's name in the URL.

Then, execute the GetSemanticScholarAuthorCitationGraph.exe tool with the following command line:

.\GetSemanticScholarAuthorCitationGraph.exe -o [OutFile] -id [AuthorID] -y [Year]

Replace:

• [OutFile] with a path to the Graph Exchange XML Format (GEXF) output file. This is where the graph will be stored.
• [AuthorID] with the multi-digit author ID.
• [Year] with the earliest year since which papers should be included in the graph. This allows you to analyse, for instance, papers for the last five years. The parameter -y is optional.

There are two optional parameters available (both override each other so only one should be specified):

• --include-relevant-references - include also references to co-author papers.
• --include-all-references - include all references.

The tool will output also statistics of each author after analysis. The format of the output is as follows:

[AuthorID]\t[AuthorName]\t[PaperCount]\t[SelfCitationCount]\t[CoAuthorCitationCount]\t[OtherCitationCount]

The GEXF graph can be visualised, for instance, using Gephi.

Reference

If you use the code for scientific purposes, please refer to it using:

@ebook{ss-citation-graph-builder,
  author = {Pinnis, Mārcis},
  title  = {{Semantic Scholar Citation Graph Builder}},
  url    = {https://github.com/pmarcis/citation-graph-builder},
  year   = {2020},
  note   = {Accessed Oct. 25, 2020}
}