Reference App

start date: 2022-08-04 last update: 2024-03-03

Background: This reference app takes a .csv or .xlsx file as input which contains a spreadsheet of publications and generate a word document (.docx) that showcase the citation and a crisp summary about the publication. The relevant metrics associated with each publication are DOI, title, technology and status. Ideally, the user can filter base on those metrics and generate summary .docx file for the specific attributes.

#### Thought process This project should use python libraries

• use pandas to organise the filtered data frame base on attribute input by the user
• scrape citations from PubMed or Google Scholar with beautiful soup and requests
• read in a word template (with bespoke styling) and write the citation into a .docx with specified styling
• create an app to bundle all of it together as a GUI with python wx

I wrote a blog post about this project, please feel free to checkout!

Design

If interested in the action flow, please feel free to test it out with the prototype file here. Note that you might need to have a figma account and log in first before playing with the prototype file.

File structure

• input/ contains the input files (.csv, .xlsx, .docx).
• output/ contains the output .docx with proper styling
• script/ currently are old script files in testing phase
• README.md this file
• requirements.txt contains the required python package for this project

Challenge

• python wx was a very complicated library to work with and the app does not present well visually. Having to put functional code into class-based code was also quite challenging
• The original code set up is not modularised enough and I need to do some significant clean up.

Contribute

I am particularly frustrated with the Python wx library, if anyone has some experience or would recommend another option (I also consider web framework like Flask), please kindly let me know.