README

Google Scholar Profile Parser is a PHP library which parses the HTML of a scholar's profile page from Google Scholar website and transforms its data into a regular PHP data structure.

The parsed data from a scholar is:

• his/her list of publications (title, link, authors, publisher details, citations)
• his/her citations' statistics (number of citations, h-index, i10-index)

Table of content

• Project Rationale
• Requirements
• Installation
• Usage
• Versioning
• Code Quality
• Author
• License

Project Rationale

As explained by this Wikipedia page:

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.Google Scholar is a website which indexes scholars' publications and citations.

Unfortunately Google Scholar website doesn't provide an API and I needed a way to fetch a scholar's data.

So, while I was looking for a PHP library which parses a profile page from Google Scholar website, I only found Scholar parser from Daniel Schreij. But I was unhappy with this library's dependency upon PhantomJS which development is suspended (and will likely not resume, leaving users without support). So I decided to rewrite this library redesigning it to depend only on PHP, and no more Javascript.

Requirements

Major versions vs. PHP:

• 3.x: PHP 8.1+
• 2.x: PHP 7.1+
• 1.x: PHP 5.6+

As stated in composer.json, it requires PHP extension DOM.

Installation

Use Composer to download and install this library as well as its dependencies.

composer require bborrel/google-scholar-profile-parser

Usage

See the examples in the library's documentation.

Versioning

This library use SemVer for versioning. For available versions, see the tags on this repository. For feature changes, see the CHANGELOG.md file for details.

Code Quality

The code of this library:

• follows the PSR-1 and PSR-12 coding standards
• follows the PSR-4 autoloading standard
• is statically analysed with PHPQA (which wraps several tools, notably PHPCS, PHPMD, PHPStan and Psalm), and by Code Climate (which is setup with plugins Phan, PHPMD, SonarPHP)
• is unit tested with PHPUnit (code coverage on Coveralls)
• is mutation tested with Infection
• is tested for compatibility with different versions of PHP (see .travis.yml for details)
• has its dependencies checked for known security issues by Packagist API
• is continuously integrated on TravisCI

These tools are installed with the library as long as you do not specify the option --no-dev when running the install or update Composer commands.

To run the static analysis tools and the unit tests via PHPQA:

./vendor/bin/phpqa

To see the reports generated by PHPQA use a browser to open the file ./build/phpqa.html.

Author

Benoit Borrel

License

This library is licensed under the GPL-3.0-only License, see the LICENSE.md file for details.