cli – Parerga und Paralipomena http://www.michelepasin.org/blog At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded - Wittgenstein Wed, 29 May 2019 14:38:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.11 13825966 Introducing DimCli: a Python CLI for the Dimensions API http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2019/05/24/introducing-dimcli-a-python-cli-for-dimensions-api/ Fri, 24 May 2019 11:10:15 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=3322 For the last couple of months I’ve been working on a new open source Python project. This is called DimCli  and it’s a library aimed at making it simpler to work with the Dimensions Analytics API.

The project is available on Github. In a nutshell, DimCli helps people becoming productive with the powerful scholarly analytics API from Dimensions. See the video below for a quick taster of the functionalities available.

Background

I recenlty joined the Dimensions team, so needed a way to get to grips with their feature-rich API (official docs). So, building DimCli has been a fun way for me to dig into the logic of the Dimensions Search Language (DSL).

Plus, this project gave me a chance to learn more about two awesome Python technologies: JupyterLab and its magic commands, as well as the Python Prompt Toolkit library.

Screenshot 2019-05-24 at 12.16.47.png

Features

In a nutshell, this is what DimCli has to offer:

  • It’s an interactive query console for the Dimensions Analytics API (ps: Dimensions is a world-class research-data platform including information about millions of documents like publications, patents, grants, clinical trials and policy documents.
  • It helps learning the Dimensions Search Language (DSL) thanks to a built-in autocomplete and documentation search mechanism.
  • It handles authentication transparently either via a global user-specific credentials file, or by passing credentials manually (e.g. when used within shared environments).
  • It allows to export results to CSV, JSON and pandas dataframes, hence making it easier to integrate with other data analysis tools.
  • It is compatible with Jupyter, e.g. it includes various magic commands that make it super simple to interrogate Dimensions (various examples here).

    • Feedback

    DimCli lives on Github, so for any feedback or bug reports, feel free to open an issue there.

    Screenshot 2019-05-23 at 18.06.32.png

     

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