Automatic Query |Author citations

Question

Thanks for letting me ask my question here.

Some background: In academia as in all fields of life, there are "superstars". Those superstars are widely recognized, and their publications often cited. The question I am asking myself is, are they often cited because their papers are (still) outstanding, or simply because they are well known?

Think of Tweets. Millions of people read Mr. T's (think of what T stands for) tweets, but almost noone reads the thoughtfully written, smart and witty tweet of your neighbor. So, in this particular case, # of likes ("citation") does not necessarily correspond to quality, even though at some point (the beginning of Mr. T's career) it presumably has. Is it the same in academia?

Now, to answer my question I'd like to query authors and make a time-series of their publications and corresponding citations.
The question is, can I do this automatically? So make a txt file authors.txt that contains author1, author2,... and for each one of them query for example their Google Scholar Profile. If anyone has a suggestion for alternative datasources that would support an automatization, that would also be greatly appreciated!

So far, I have stumbled upon "Publish or Perish", which is a great tool and for a single author does exactly what I want it to do. But it doesn't allow for automatic querying. Contacting the developer behind this great program led to the answer "It may well be possible to write your own scripts to collect automated data from all data sources, especially those with APIs, but PoP doesn't facilitate this."
Does anyone know how to do this? I have basic knowledge of for example bash, so my first idea would be to use wget, but the URLs of authorA seems to be encoded in a random manner, so it's not googlescholar.com/authoraA/... or anything like it.

Thanks so much!

Answer 1

If anyone else should ever happen to have the same question:

This github repo has a python script that does exactly what I want. So call the script for each line in the txt.file and it works!