Extracting information from PDFs of research papers [closed]

Answer 1

PyPDF might be of help. It provides extensive API for reading and writing the content of a PDF file (un-encrypted), and its written in an easy language Python.

Answer 2

I'm only allowed one link per posting so this is it: pdfinfo Linux manual page

This might get the title and authors. Look at the bottom of the manual page, and there's a link to www.foolabs.com/xpdf where the open source for the program can be found, as well as binaries for various platforms.

To pull out bibliographic references, look at cb2bib:

cb2Bib is a free, open source, and multiplatform application for rapidly extracting unformatted, or unstandardized bibliographic references from email alerts, journal Web pages, and PDF files.

You might also want to check the discussion forums at www.zotero.org where this topic has been discussed.

Answer 3

CERMINE - Content ExtRactor and MINEr

Described in the paper: TKACZYK, Dominika, et al. CERMINE: automatic extraction of structured metadata from scientific literature. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), 2015, 18.4: 317-335.

Mainly written in Java and available as open source at github.

Answer 4

Take a look at iText. It is a Java library that will let you read PDFs. You will still face the problem of finding the right data, but the library will provide formatting and layout information that might be usable to infer purpose.

Answer 5

Have a look at this research paper - Accurate Information Extraction from Research Papers using Conditional Random Fields

You might want to use an open-source package like Stanford NER to get started on CRFs.

Or perhaps, you could try importing them (the research papers) to Mendeley. Apparently, it should extract the necessary information for you.

Hope this helps.

Answer 6

I recommend gscholar in combination with pdftotext.

Although PDF provides meta data, it is seldomly populated with correct content. Often "None" or "Adobe-Photoshop" or other dumb strings are inplace of the title field, for example. That is why none of the above tools might derive correct information from PDFs as the title might be anywhere in the document. Another example: many papers of conference proceedings might also have the title of the conference, or the name of the editors which confuses automatic extraction tools. The results are then dead wrong when you are interested of the real authors of the paper.

So I suggest a semi-automatic approach involving google scholar.

1. Render the PDF to text, so you might extract: author, and title.
2. Second copy paste some of this info and query google scholar. To automate this, I employ the cool python script gscholar.py.

So in real life this is what I do:

me@box> pdftotext 10.1.1.90.711.pdf - | head
Computational Geometry 23 (2002) 183–194
www.elsevier.com/locate/comgeo

Voronoi diagrams on the sphere ✩
Hyeon-Suk Na a , Chung-Nim Lee a , Otfried Cheong b,∗
a Department of Mathematics, Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea
b Institute of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands

Received 28 June 2001; received in revised form 6 September 2001; accepted 12 February 2002
Communicated by J.-R. Sack
me@box> gscholar.py "Voronoi diagrams on the sphere Hyeon-Suk" 
@article{na2002voronoi,
  title={Voronoi diagrams on the sphere},
  author={Na, Hyeon-Suk and Lee, Chung-Nim and Cheong, Otfried},
  journal={Computational Geometry},
  volume={23},
  number={2},
  pages={183--194},
  year={2002},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}

EDIT: Be careful, you might encounter captchas. Another great script is bibfetch.