An invitation to test a scientific search plugin I wrote

DEVONagent
1

Dear all,

thanks to @cgrunenberg’s quick help (during a holiday!), I got my first search plugin to a state where I feel comfortable inviting people to test it. Writing plugins is new to me and I do it purely out of interest, so there are surely a few issues to be found.

The plugin targets BASE (base-search.net), the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. Its self-description is at https://www.base-search.net/about/en/index.php; for this thread, it will be sufficient to say it’s a huge, open-access focused scientific search engine that I have not yet seen supported in DEVONagent. I hope that the plugin will be helpful to researchers in the more open-access-friendly sciences, where OAI is a familiar acronym.

The source code snippet is included below. To test the plugin, just create a new module named “BASE with OA boost”, click on “edit” and paste the code into the edit window.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Description</key>
	<string>A plugin for the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine with Open Access ranking boost enabled</string>
	<key>EngineUrl</key>
	<string>https://www.base-search.net/Search/Results?lookfor=_agentQuery_&amp;type=all&amp;page=_agentOffset_&amp;l=_agentLanguage_&amp;oaboost=1</string>
	<key>Identifier</key>
	<string>www.base-search.net</string>
	<key>Info</key>
	<string>BASE plugin v0.1, J. Starek</string>
	<key>Keyword</key>
	<array>
		<string>Science</string>
	</array>
	<key>LinksEnd</key>
	<string>==== Pager ====</string>
	<key>LinksNotMatching</key>
	<array>
		<string>*base-search.net*</string>
		<string>*lucene.apache.org*</string>
		<string>*maps.google.com*</string>
		<string>*scholar.google.com/scholar?q=*</string>
		<string>*openstreetmap.org*</string>
		<string>*twitter.com*</string>
	</array>
	<key>LinksStart</key>
	<string>id="hit-list"</string>
	<key>Name</key>
	<string>BASE with OA boost</string>
	<key>OffsetPerPage</key>
	<integer>1</integer>
	<key>Operators</key>
	<integer>0</integer>
	<key>ParseLinks</key>
	<true/>
	<key>Start</key>
	<integer>1</integer>
	<key>TextEnd</key>
	<string>!-- RecordDrivers/Base/result.tpl--</string>
	<key>TextStart</key>
	<string>record-panel panel panel-default</string>
	<key>Version</key>
	<string>0.1</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Many thanks in advance for all feedback!

2 Likes
2

I tried it and it worked fine. Thanks for sharing.

Alas, at least for me, the BASE doesn’t provide as many results as I would like and I prefer other Search databases.

3

Actually it wasn’t a public holiday here :wink: