litstudy is a Python package that allows analysis of scientific literature from the comfort of a Jupyter notebook. It enables selecting scientific publications and study their metadata using visualizations, network analysis, and natural language processing.

In essence, this package offers five features

• Extract metadata of scientific documents from various sources. The data is united by a standard interface, allowing data from different sources to be combined.
• Filter, select, deduplicate, and annotate collections of documents.
• Compute and plot general statistics of document sets (e.g., statistics on authors, venues, publication years, etc.)
• Generate and plot various bibliographic networks as an interactive visualization.
• Topic discovery based on natural language processing (NLP) allows automatic discovery of popular topics.

If you have any questions or run into an error, see the Frequently Asked Questions section of the documentation. If your question or error is not on the list, please check the GitHub issue tracker for a similar issue or create a new issue.

An example notebook is available in notebooks/example.ipynb and here.

litstudy is available on PyPI! Full installation guide is available here.

pip install litstudy

Or install the lastest development version directly from GitHub:

pip install git+https://github.com/NLeSC/litstudy

Documentation is available here.

The package has been tested for Python 3.7. Required packages are available in requirements.txt.

litstudy supports several data sources. Some of these sources (such as semantic Scholar, CrossRef, and arXiv) are openly available. However to access the Scopus API, you (or your institute) requires a Scopus subscription and you need to request an Elsevier Developer API key (see Elsevier Developers).

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.

See CHANGELOG.md.

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

If you use litstudy in you work, please cite the following publication:

S. Heldens, A. Sclocco, H. Dreuning, B. van Werkhoven, P. Hijma, J. Maassen & R.V. van Nieuwpoort (2022), "litstudy: A Python package for literature reviews", SoftwareX 20

As BibTeX:

@article{litstudy,
    title = {litstudy: A Python package for literature reviews},
    journal = {SoftwareX},
    volume = {20},
    pages = {101207},
    year = {2022},
    issn = {2352-7110},
    doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2022.101207},
    url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235271102200125X},
    author = {S. Heldens and A. Sclocco and H. Dreuning and B. {van Werkhoven} and P. Hijma and J. Maassen and R. V. {van Nieuwpoort}},
}

Don't forget to check out these other amazing software packages!

• ScientoPy: Open-source Python based scientometric analysis tool.
• pybliometrics: API-Wrapper to access Scopus.
• ASReview: Active learning for systematic reviews.
• metaknowledge: Python library for doing bibliometric and network analysis in science.
• tethne: Python module for bibliographic network analysis.
• VOSviewer: Software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks.