This is a little tool to find freely available, open-access PDFs for articles in a Bibtex file, and to alter the Bibtex file so that it points to these PDF files.
The tool is quite specific to the use-case I had, but the included functions might be useful in other contexts.
It requires an installation of requests
(https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/) and bibtexparser
(https://github.com/sciunto-org/python-bibtexparser)
Here's what it does when executed as a script (change SOURCE_FILENAME and
TARGET_FILENAME in the source code directly to adapt to your system):
- Go through the Bibtex file and check for each entry whether it has an URL
with a Pubmed link (
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/...) - Check whether PubMedCentral has a PDF for this article (following up redirections if necessary)
- If yes, replace the URL in the Bibtex file with the URL to the PDF; if no, delete the URL (if we have a link to the article via the DOI field)
Please note that I am not particularly interested in extending this into a fully-featured package that does a lot more than that. This was mostly a one-use script that I am sharing just in case it is useful to anyone.