Webscraping is a useful tool for gathering data from public websites, but researchers must develop some fundamental software skills to use it.
When Ensheng Dong co-created the Johns Hopkins University COVID‑19 Dashboard in January 2020, it was a labour of love. Dong, a systems engineer at the university in Baltimore, Maryland, had friends and family in China, including some in Wuhan, the site of the initial outbreak. “I really wanted to see what was going on in their area,” he says. So Dong began collecting public-health data from the cities known to be affected.
Similar tools are harvesting data across a range of disciplines. Alex Luscombe, a criminologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, uses scraping to monitor Canadian law-enforcement practices; Phill Cassey, a conservation biologist at the University of Adelaide, Australia, tracks the global wildlife trade on Internet forums; and Georgia Richards, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, UK, scans coroners’ reports for preventable causes of death.
“I mostly use developer mode now,” says Luscombe, referring to the browser setting that allows users to peel away a website’s familiar façade to get at the raw HTML and other programming code below. But there are tools that can help, including the SelectorGadget browser extension, which provides a user-friendly interface to identify the ‘tags’ associated with specific website elements.The complexity of a scraping project is largely determined by the site being targeted.
If private and personally identifiable data are being harvested, extra precautions might be required. Researchers led by Cedric Bousquet at the University Hospital of Saint-Étienne in France developed a tool called Vigi4Med, which scrapes medical forums to identify drug-associated adverse events that might have escaped notice during clinical testing.
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