Semantic Scholar has an API

[huitema]

On 1 Aug 2019, at 12:36, Stephen Farrell stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie wrote:

Hiya,

On 01/08/2019 12:10, Martin Thomson wrote:

On Thu, Aug 1, 2019, at 18:19, Stephen Farrell wrote:

• I also played with scholar and can't see a 123 result
  for 8446,

I get 165 from my vantage point.

I also get "About 165 results" for [1].

In the past I've used URLs like [2] which gives a nicer
looking citation count, and is quite different from [3]
which is the same RFC using a URL of the form Christian
used. ([2] says 1403 citations, [3] says 1980 results.)
Sadly the equivalent of [2] doesn't give any results for
8446 or other recent RFCs so I guess some indexing down
a pit in google scholar changed at some point.

And of course many citations will be to earlier RFCs for
TLS, e.g. [4,5] give 3882 and 3860 respectively.

And since I was mucking about waiting for a student
meeting... :-)

For 8446, wia DLBP [6], you can get links to semantic
scholar [7] with another citation count 342 [8] and some
"velocity" information. DLBP also point to msft [9]
that gives an answer of 138. [10]

Semantic Scholar has an API (http://api.semanticscholar.org) that lets you get at the list of citations.

http://api.semanticscholar.org/v1/paper/10.17487/rfc8446?include_unknown_references=true
(it seems inconsistent whether it wants “RFC” or “rfc”)

I think the bottom line is you can't tell much more than
a ranking of order-of-magnitude of citations, from scholar,
or elsewhere, for RFCs.

Don’t tell the research funding agencies…

Cheers,
Colin