python-autocite provides modules and a command line utility for automatically generating citiations of web pages.
Licensed under the MIT license. Though not required by the license, please consider dropping a line if you find this software useful.
Requirements:
- BeautifulSoup4
- Requests
- Dateutil
- Python 3
- (optional) pageres - for capturing screenshots
Run python setup.py install to install.
Command line usage:
Run autocite --help to see the help text.
Protip: Missing information will be filled in with "[[[field name]]]" which should make it easy to search for.
Currently only supports APA, but is extensible for other formats.
Using in other programs:
from python_autocite.lib import *
The modules available are:
python_autocite.lib.datafinder.Datafinder- attempts to pull publication information from a BeautifulSoup souppython_autocite.lib.citation.Citation- Contains citation data, with intelligent setterspython_autocite.lib.formatter.CitationFormatter- Interface for creating citation formatterspython_autocite.lib.formatter.APAFormatter- formats a Citation into an APA citation
Cite a single URL:
autocite --url http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/12/report-data-caps-just-a-cash-cow-for-internet-providers/
This will print to stdout:
Anderson, N. (2012, December 18). Report: data caps just a “cash cow” for Internet providers. Retrieved June 18, 2017, from http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/12/report-data-caps-just-a-cash-cow-for-internet-providers/
Cite a list of URLs (newline separated), and save the citations to a file called citations.txt
autocite --from-file urllist.txt --to-text citations.txt
Optionally, you can add the --capture flag to capture screenshots of websites. This will not work for all
websites, and may increase the time to generate citations significantly. Each capture will be stored in the current
directory.
This software is not perfect and will make mistakes. Check that your citations are correct before using them for any important purpose.