Publication Harvester

Description

The Publication Harvester is a software tool that downloads publications from PubMed, stores them in a database, and generates an accurate count of publications for a set of people. The harvester uses a set of possible name variations for that individual, and records the list of authors. The goal of the software is to gather large amounts of data about specific people from PubMed for statistical analysis. It records the people, publications and publication data in a database, and generates reports based on that data.

The Publication Harvester software runs on Windows Vista and XP. It was written in C#, and requires .NET Framework 4.7.2i or later. (This should already be installed if you're running a current version of Windows.)

Documentation

The user manual describes installation and use of the Publication Harvester software: PublicationHarvester_Manual.doc

The software requirements specification that was used used to develop and maintain the software can be found here: PublicationHarvester_Requirements.doc.

For more information, see PublicationHarvester: An Open-Source Software Tool for Science Policy Research (Research Policy 35 (2006) 970.974).

Download

Software downloads:

Quick start:

  1. If .NET Framework 3.5 isn't installed, either download and install it or (preferred) use Widows Update to install it.
  2. Download and install MySQL 5.7.
  3. Download and install MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.1.
  4. Use the Windows ODBC Administrator (odbcad32.exe) to create an ODBC connection to the MySQL database installed in step #2.
  5. Download the latest version of Publication Harvester, unzip it, and run the installer.
  6. Run the Publication Harvester from the Start menu.

More detailed installation instructions can be found in the user manual (see below).

The following sample files may be helpful:

Troubleshooting

Screenshot

Screenshot


License

This software is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Contact Information

The Publication Harvester project is maintained by Andrew Stellman of Stellman & Greene Consulting. If you have questions, comments, patches, or bug reports, please contact pubharvester@stellman-greene.com.

Revision history

We gratefully acknowledgement is given to the financial support of the National Science Foundation (Award SBE-0738142).