How to: Register Application and use api_key

Open APIs exist to allow users to access academic meta data easily. Some of those APIs may require a user to register their application in order to do so.

Currently, the following APIs implemented within the library will require you to register:

One you have registered as a user and have register your application, it will be given an application key.

In order to be able to use the APIs listed here via Arcas you will have to add this key to the api_key.py file under the API’s respective folder.

Firstly, you will have to clone the repository from GitHub using the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/Nikoleta-v3/Arcas.git

Once you have a copy of the repository you can see that there is a folder for each API located at src/arcas. We can see this by typing the following commands:

$ cd Arcas/src/arcas
$ ls
arXiv  IEEE  __init__.py  nature  PLOS  __pycache__  Springer  tools.py  version.py

Both IEEE and the Springer folders has an api_key.py file which is where we need to add your application key.

For example lets consider IEEE. Using the following command we list the files within the folder:

$ ls IEEE
api_key.py  __init__.py  main.py

We can also see what’s in the api_key.py file:

$ cat IEEE/api_key.py
api_key = 'Your key here'

All we need to do is replace our key with the 'Your key here' and save.

Once this is done all you have to do is go ahead and install the library. We need to navigate to the top of the repository:

$ cd ...

and then just use the following command to install the package:

$ python setup.py install

We will need to add your Springer key in src/arcas/Springer/api_key.py as well so we can use both APIs.

Once we have done this we should be ready to use all the APIs available to us via Arcas.