Patent Thicket

Project

Patent Thicket
Project Information
Has title	Patent Thicket
Has owner	Grace Tan
Has start date	Summer 2018
Has deadline date
Has project status	Active
Is dependent on	Google Scholar Crawler, PDF Downloader, PDF to Text Converter
Has sponsor	McNair Center
Has project output	Tool
Copyright © 2019 edegan.com. All Rights Reserved.

Location of Files

E://McNair/Software/Patent_Thicket

Downloaded PDFs:

E://McNair/Projects/Software/Patent_Thicket/AllPDFs/successful_downloads

Converted PDFs to txt files:

E://McNair/Projects/Software/Patent_Thicket/Parsed_Texts

Google Scholar Crawler

Used Google Scholar Crawler

I used the selenium box and switched from Rice Visitor, Rice Owls, and eduroam to prevent Google Scholar from blocking me.

I downloaded 613 pdf urls and 958 bibtex filees from 100 pages on Google Scholar when searching for "patent thicket."

Downloading PDFs

Used PDF Downloader

I tweaked the code to take into account repeat of file names. 5 of the pdf urls were not downloadable so I ended up with 608 working pdfs.

pdf_to_txt_bulk_PTLR.py

See PDF to Text Converter

The code must be run in E because of the libraries it uses is not in Z. I reinstalled pdfminer which might be a problem in the future if the libraries change.

This program converts all pdfs to txt files. It also generates two files _LOG_ERR.txt and _LOG_RUN.txt that includes the names of the pdfs that could not be converted and were converted successfully. Some of the files that were successfuly converted, especially the very small ones, don't have the text from the paper.

There were 573 successful txt files and 36 files that failed to convert (which does not add up to 608 but I'm not sure why).