Observer

An effort by eLife Sciences to provide an unsophisticated reporting application for article data.

This project uses the Python programming language, the Django web framework and a relational database.

Github repository.

reports

A report URL looks like:

For example, if you wanted the latest articles published, the url would look like:

Reports are paginated and ordered and you can page through their results. For example:

returns the twentieth page of the latest articles. And:

returns you results 2000 through 2100.

Reports have a default format and often have more than one format. For example:

is formatted as RSS. The latest-articles report also supports plain CSV:

or, as a simple format hint:

available reports

latest articles report

All of the latest articles published at eLife, including in-progress POA (publish-on-accept) articles.

latest articles by subject report

Articles published by eLife, filtered by given subjects

upcoming articles report

The latest eLife POA (publish-on-accept) articles. These articles are in-progress and their final VOR (version-of-record) is still being produced.

digests report

The latest eLife digests.

labs-posts report

The latest eLife labs-posts.

community report

The latest eLife community content.

interviews report

The latest eLife interviews.

collections report

The latest eLife collections.

blog-articles report

The latest eLife blog articles.

features report

The latest eLife featured articles.

podcasts report

The latest eLife podcast episodes.

magazine report

The latest eLife magazine content

reviewed-preprints report

The latest eLife reviewed preprints

published article index report

The dates and times of publication for all articles published at eLife. If an article had a POA version, the date and time of the POA version is included.

published research article index report

The dates and times of publication for all research articles published at eLife. If an article had a POA version, the date and time of the POA version is included.

daily profile counts report

Daily record of the total number of profiles

Exeter, new POA articles report

All POA articles ordered by the date and time they were first published, most recent POA articles to least recent.

Exeter, new and updated VOR articles report

All new and updated VOR articles ordered by their updated date, most recent VOR articles to least recent.

sitemap report

generates a complete listing of journal content as a sitemap.xml file

EBSCO, new VOR articles report

All new VOR articles ordered by their date, most recent VOR articles to least recent.

installation

code

git clone https://github.com/elifesciences/observer
cd observer
./install.sh

PostgreSQL is used in production so there is a dependency on psycopg2 which requires your distribution's 'libpq' library to be installed. On Arch Linux, this is 'libpqxx', on Ubuntu this is 'libpq-dev'.

updating

installation

code

git pull
./install.sh

documents

code

./regenerate-readme.sh

reports

See updating reports on instructions for modifying reports.

testing

code

./test.sh

running

code

./manage.sh runserver
xdg-open http://127.0.0.1:8000/

Copyright & Licence

Copyright 2024 eLife Sciences. Licensed under the GPLv3

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.