acmdownload
Python script to automatically download metadata about research papers, starting with some paper and transitively downloading the most relevant papers, from ACM digital library.
WARNING:
Do not try to modify the script to download many documents in parallel; at some point the dl.acm.org site will notice this and temporarily block your IP.
Installing and running:
- Download and install the latest release of Python 3.
- Install the requests library: run the command pip3 install requests.
Run using the command line python acmdownload.py.
Finding the UID of a paper
Search for a paper on dl.acm.org and go to its page. For example the page for the paper "Spanner: Google's globally-distributed database" from OSDI'12 has the url https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2387880.2387905. The DOI is the string 10.5555/2387880.2387905.
Change the doi global variable in the script to the DOI for your paper. The documents_to_download global variable is the total number of documents to include in the set before ranking them according to number of references from within the set.