Google Scholar Proxy

title: Google Scholar Proxy for structured citation mining and research insights

description: Build a Scholar-optimized proxy mesh that reliably captures citation links, author profiles, and h-index snapshots—exported as clean JSON for literature reviews, citation networks, and trend dashboards—while respecting platform terms, rate limits, and privacy.

Scholar’s pages are dynamic and sensitive to pace, geography, and identity. Reliability comes from architecture, not IP volume. Blend residential egress for interactive flows with efficient data-center exits for static assets. Use short identities for discovery and sticky sessions for stateful paths such as author pages, “Cited by,” and multi-page result sets. Rotate on milestones—query change, page advance, or filter toggle—rather than every request to preserve cookies and reduce soft blocks.

• Identity & sessions: per-worker cookie jars, deterministic rotation, capped requests per IP/domain.
• Geo & locale: align IP country, Accept-Language, and time zone with the study market to avoid catalog skew.
• Client realism: modern TLS/HTTP2, stable User-Agent and header profiles; human-paced think time.
• Observability: success-per-10k calls, TTFB, valid-page yield after retries, and anchor checks (titles, authors, venues).
• Compliance: collect only permitted, public data; never bypass authentication, CAPTCHAs, paywalls, or DRM.

Citation graph traversal. Traverse from seed queries or papers through “Cited by,” “Related articles,” and co-citation panels. Maintain a visited set and store edges (source → target) with relation type and capture timestamp. De-duplicate by DOI/ISBN/handle when present, otherwise via normalized title/author/year with fuzzy matching.

Author profiles. Extract verified name variants, affiliations, research areas, h-index/i10-index, and publication lists with pagination cursors. Track profile changes (affiliation moves, topic shifts) over time to power alerts and longitudinal analyses.

H-index snapshots. Record overall h-index plus 5-year h-index and total citations. Store snapshot date to support trend lines and cohort comparisons. Where PDFs are linked publicly, store URLs and hashes; only download content when you have a clear legal basis.

• Anchors to verify: title, authors, venue, year, citations count, link targets, and availability notes.
• Quality gates: schema validation, language normalization, dedupe rate, and match confidence scores.
• Evidence: optional PNGs of result tiles with capture metadata (redacting PII where applicable).

Literature review automation. Turn messy result pages into consistent records: canonical title, abstract snippet, venue, year, identifiers, and outbound links. Group by topic and rank by recency, citations, or venue tier to produce brief-ready reading lists.

Citation network analysis. Build graphs per domain, institution, or lab; compute centrality, community clusters, and bridging papers. Surface “sleeping beauties,” rising topics, and under-cited but highly connected works that merit expert review.

Trend monitoring. Watchlists track authors, labs, and topics. Emit weekly diffs—new papers, citation deltas, profile changes—and route them to Slack/Email/BI. For R&D, overlay funding, patent mentions, and collaboration patterns to guide outreach and recruiting.

• KPIs: parser pass rate, dedupe precision/recall against gold sets, median latency, cost per 1k valid items.
• Outputs: JSON/CSV/Parquet, plus human-readable briefs with top papers, key authors, and network thumbnails.

Score partners on predictable outcomes, not promises about pool size. Define success as valid structured output—expected anchors present and schema-valid—rather than raw 200s. Test during peak concurrency with realistic pacing and multi-city routing.

• CAPTCHA resilience: polite pacing, jittered backoff, milestone-based rotation, and per-ASN/per-city budgets—without bypass services.
• Rate-limit handling: distinct strategies for 429 vs. timeouts; automatic pool moves when soft blocks spike.
• Exports: clean JSON with stable keys (title, authors[], venue, year, ids, citations, links, profile fields), plus manifests tying artifacts to provenance.
• Geotargeting: city-level routing where visibility differs; IPv4/IPv6, residential/mobile options.
• Governance: IP provenance, encryption, access controls, retention windows, and audit-ready logs.
• SLOs: ≥98% schema-valid items on stable routes; clear incident comms and rollbacks.
• Cost control: price per 1k successful records and per deduped GB; lifecycle rules for storage.

Bottom line. A Scholar-ready proxy program blends clean egress, disciplined sessions, and traversal logic into a single, measurable pipeline. With structured JSON, evidence, and governance by default, your teams ship literature reviews, network maps, and trend dashboards they can trust—without risking compliance or platform health.