Zotero to Semantic Scholar

Zotero and Semantic Scholar are very powerful. I personally use the first one to manage my bibliography and generate bibtex for my own notes and the second one as an alternative to Google Scholar to alert me on the papers published. However, it can be boring to enter your bibliography in each site, even more when it's composed of hundred of different papers ! Therefore, I made this project to send the bibliography from Zotero to Semantic Scholar and to add alert on articles.

How to send data to Semantic Scholar

In Zotero, export the library in format CSV (File/Export Library), then launch the gui. Complete the login and password fields with your semanticscholar account informations. Select the csv file you exported just before. If you don't select any csv it will look by default is there is a bibliography.csv file in the current folder. Finally, click on Send data to SemanticScholar.com..., wait a few minutes... that's it ! 🙂

There is a save system, to know which papers has been sent to Semantic Scholar. Therefore, if you need to send a new part of your library to Semantic Scholar it will only send the new articles. Likewise, if the application crash, your progression will be saved.

Building

1. You need to have python 3 installed.
2. You need the following package : pandas, csv, tkinter, distance, and selenium To install them use this command in the project folder :

pip install -r requirements.txt

For windows os skip to step 4.

3. You need the driver firefox for selenium that are available here. Moreover, the folder downloaded here need to be in path.

4. Finally build main.py file.

I didn't try the project elsewhere than on windows, but I think it could works on linux or macOS, it may requires additional installations.

Potential improvements

• Test it on other OS than Windows.
• Make a script to automatize the installation.
• Package the script in an executable.
• Switching from an external gui to a zotero add-on integrated directly in zotero.
• Add unit test
• For now it'll only look for zotero item of this type : journalArticle, conferencePaper, bookSection, preprint, thesis, or book. If you want to add other type add them on 121 of main.py.

Issues

If you have some issue with the application, do not hesitate to put them in github issue.