ACM Digital Library Search Tool

A short and rudimentary Python implementation to search for titles at https://dl.acm.org. Based on Selenium and BeautifulSoup. Currently only supports searches for paper titles.

Requires

Chromedriver installed on device https://developer.chrome.com/docs/chromedriver/downloads. As of now the only supported webdriver.

Limitations

• Do not use it too frequently in short periods of time, ACM might block your IP
• Keep in mind, ACM technically disallows bots

Installation

Options:

• git clone https://github.com/paulleo13/acm-lib-search.git
• via pip: pip install acm-lib-search (! WARNING: Does not work as of right now. Haven't gotten around to fix it yet.)

How to use

You can use the tool either via the command line with python acm_lib_search.py --paper_title="Sample paper title" --chromedriver_path="/optional/path/to/chromedriver" (The chromedriver flag is optional and only necessary if the driver is not in your PATH variable). Then the top result is saved to a file named results.json in the current working directory.

Or import the ACMLibSearcher class from acm_lib_search and search for results as follows:

1. Create an instance with optional chromedriver path:

   searcher = ACMLibSearcher(chromedriver_path="/path/")

2. Search for a paper title by calling one of the search methods e.g.

   results = searcher.search_top_20("Paper title")

3. Optionally save them to a json file with

   _ = searcher.save_results("name_of_file.json")