journalAbbreviations

Overview

This module handles the abbreviations, known as J29 abbreviations and given by the J9 tag in WOS Records and for journal titles that WOS employs in citations.

The citations provided by WOS used abbreviated journal titles instead of the full names. The full list of abbreviations can be found at a series pages divided by letter starting at images.webofknowledge.com/WOK46/help/WOS/A_abrvjt.html. The function updatej9DB() is used to scape and parse the pages, it must be run without error before the other features can be used. metaknowledge. If the database is requested by getj9dict(), which is what Citations use, and the database is not found or is corrupted then updatej9DB() will be run to download the database if this fails an mkException will be raised, the download and parsing usually takes less than a second on a good internet connection.

The other functions of the module are for manually adding and removing abbreviations from the database. It is recommended that this be done with the command-line tool metaknowledge instead of with a script.

Functions

metaknowledge.journalAbbreviations.backend.addToDB(abbr=None, dbname='manualj9Abbreviations')

Adds abbr to the database of journals. The database is kept separate from the one scraped from WOS, this supersedes it. The database by default is stored with the WOS one and the name is given by metaknowledge.journalAbbreviations.manualDBname. To create an empty database run addToDB without an abbr argument.

Parameters

abbr : optional [str or dict[str : str]]

The journal abbreviation to be added to the database, it can either be a single string in which case that string will be added with its self as the full name, or a dict can be given with the abbreviations as keys and their names as strings, use pipes ('|') to separate multiple names. Note, if the empty string is given as a name the abbreviation will be considered manually excluded, i.e. having excludeFromDB() run on it.

dbname : optional [str]

The name of the database file, default is metaknowledge.journalAbbreviations.manualDBname.

metaknowledge.journalAbbreviations.backend.excludeFromDB(abbr=None, dbname='manualj9Abbreviations')

Marks abbr to be excluded the database of journals. The database is kept separate from the one scraped from WOS, this supersedes it. The database by default is stored with the WOS one and the name is given by metaknowledge.journalAbbreviations.manualDBname. To create an empty database run addToDB() without an abbr argument.

Parameters

abbr : optional [str or tuple[str] or list[str]

The journal abbreviation to be excluded from the database, it can either be a single string in which case that string will be exclude or a list/tuple of strings can be given with the abbreviations.

dbname : optional [str]

The name of the database file, default is metaknowledge.journalAbbreviations.manualDBname.

metaknowledge.journalAbbreviations.backend.getj9dict(dbname='j9Abbreviations', manualDB='manualj9Abbreviations', returnDict='both')

Returns the dictionary of journal abbreviations mapping to a list of the associated journal names. By default the local database is used. The database is in the file dbname in the same directory as this source file

Parameters

dbname : optional [str]

The name of the downloaded database file, the default is determined at run time. It is recommended that this remain untouched.

manualDB : optional [str]

The name of the manually created database file, the default is determined at run time. It is recommended that this remain untouched.

returnDict : optional [str]

default 'both', can be used to get both databases or only one with 'WOS' or 'manual'.

metaknowledge.journalAbbreviations.backend.j9urlGenerator(nameDict=False)

How to get all the urls for the WOS Journal Title Abbreviations. Each is varies by only a few characters. These are the currently in use urls they may change.

They are of the form:

“https://images.webofknowledge.com/images/help/WOS/%7BVAL%7D_abrvjt.html”

Where {VAL} is a capital letter or the string “0-9”

Returns

list[str]

A list of all the url’s strings

metaknowledge.journalAbbreviations.backend.updatej9DB(dbname='j9Abbreviations', saveRawHTML=False)

Updates the database of Journal Title Abbreviations. Requires an internet connection. The data base is saved relative to the source file not the working directory.

Parameters

dbname : optional [str]

The name of the database file, default is “j9Abbreviations.db”

saveRawHTML : optional [bool]

Determines if the original HTML of the pages is stored, default False. If True they are saved in a directory inside j9Raws begining with todays date.