[SOLVED] Accessing ISI Web of Science through SOAP

Accessing ISI Web of Science through SOAP

I'm trying to write a python script that retrieves information about publications from ISI Web of Science. I found domoritz's python script wos.py on GitHub. It uses Suds to connect to the ISI Web of Science web service. I've imported it into my python script and I tried this code, following the very brief instructions in the comments:

from wos import *
soap = WokmwsSoapClient()
results = soap.search('Hallam')

I then get an error:

suds.WebFault: Server raised fault: 'line 1:1: unexpected token: Hallam'

I looked through the code in wos.py. Here is the search function:

def search(self, query):
    qparams = {
        'databaseID' : 'WOS',
        'userQuery' : query,
        'queryLanguage' : 'en',
        'editions' : [{
            'collection' : 'WOS',
            'edition' : 'SCI',
        },{
            'collection' : 'WOS',
            'edition' : 'SSCI',
        }]
    }

    rparams = {
        'count' : 5, # 1-100
        'firstRecord' : 1,
        'fields' : [{
            'name' : 'Relevance',
            'sort' : 'D',
        }],
    }

    return self.client['search'].service.search(qparams, rparams)

I thought maybe query can't be just a plain python string, as I saw in the WSDL page that userQuery is actually of type xs:string. But this page says that userQuery "Must be a valid WOKQL query statement. This requirement is enforced internally", which makes it seem like I don't have to pass in a special type. Anyway, I tried appending 'xs:string' to the beginning of query but I got the same error.

Does anybody know the proper way to use this method?

Solution

So apparently passing in a python string was fine, but I needed a string that was more like a search query. I found this example on the website I mentioned before:

<soap:Body>
  <woksearch:search xmlns:woksearch="http://woksearch.v3.wokmws.thomsonreuters.com">
  <!--  this request has the minimum required elements, 
      but contains all valid retrieve options 
      for this operation and databaseId -->
  <queryParameters>
     <databaseId>WOK</databaseId> 
     <userQuery>AU=Arce, G*</userQuery>      
     <queryLanguage>en</queryLanguage> 
  </queryParameters>
....

So I tried using results = soap.search('AU=Hallam') and that worked. I can now do things like print results.recordsFound and I get correct answers.