Paper Picnic đŸ§ș

A weekly basket with the latest published research in political science. On Fridays at 2 AM UTC, we query the Crossref API for new research articles that appeared in the previous 7 days across 58 journals in political science and adjacent fields.

Covered Journals

  • American Journal of Political Science
  • American Political Science Review
  • Annual Review of Political Science
  • British Journal of Political Science
  • Comparative Political Studies
  • Comparative Politics
  • Electoral Studies
  • European Journal of Political Research
  • International Organization
  • International Security
  • International Studies Quarterly
  • Journal of Conflict Resolution
  • Journal of Experimental Political Science
  • Journal of Peace Research
  • Journal of Theoretical Politics
  • Legislative Studies Quarterly
  • Party Politics
  • Political Analysis
  • Political Behavior
  • Political Geography
  • Political Psychology
  • Political Science Research and Methods
  • PS: Political Science & Politics
  • Public Choice
  • Public Opinion Quarterly
  • Quarterly Journal of Political Science
  • Research & Politics
  • The Journal of Politics
  • West European Politics
  • World Politics
  • American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
  • American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
  • American Economic Review
  • Annual Review of Economics
  • Econometrica
  • Economic Journal
  • Economic Policy
  • European Economic Review
  • Journal of Econometrics
  • Journal of Economic Literature
  • Journal of Economic Perspectives
  • Journal of Political Economy
  • Journal of Public Economics
  • Journal of the European Economic Association
  • Review of Economics and Statistics
  • The Quarterly Journal of Economics
  • The Review of Economic Studies
  • American Sociological Review
  • Annual Review of Sociology
  • European Societies
  • European Sociological Review
  • Social Forces
  • Sociological Methods & Research
  • Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
  • Nature
  • Nature Human Behaviour
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
  • Science
  • Science Advances
  • Socio-Economic Review
  • Comparative Migration Studies
  • International Migration
  • International Migration Review
  • Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Motivation

Available tools to keep up with newly published research are often frustrating. Email alerts from publishers clutter the email inbox, arrive at seemingly random intervals, and do not include abstracts. Publisher RSS feeds are similarly frustrating to use as available RSS readers are either clunky or come with expensive subscription models. Signing up to email alerts or finding the RSS feeds from a handful of publishers can easily take an entire afternoon. Twitter/X - uhm.

Moritz Marbach built Paper Picnic to keep up with newly published research in Political Science. It relies on three key ideas:

  1. Updates once a week at a known time.
  2. Displays all new research on a single web page without clutter.
  3. No registration, no ads and no personal data collection.

All data comes from the Crossref API. Crossref is the world’s largest registry of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and metadata. Continuously updated by publishers, Crossref provides an easy way to get metadata for research articles.



Backend

The backend is a crawler written in R living in a GitHub repository. Every Friday, GitHub Actions executes the crawler. Once the crawler finishes, the crawled data is put in a JSON file and rendered into a HTML file using GitHub Pages.

For each journal, the crawler retrieves all articles added to a journal in the previous week. To that end, it requests all articles for which the field “created” or “published” in the Crossref database is within the last seven days.

The crawler retrieves title, authors, full-text link, and abstract. Unfortunately, not all publishers add abstracts. Examples include the publisher Elsevier or Taylor & Francis, which for all of their journals never include abstracts (see this Crossref Blog for details).

Since journals typically have two ISSN numbers (one for print and one for electronic, see here), the crawler retrieves articles for both ISSN numbers and deduplicates the results. The ISSN numbers used for the crawler come from the Crossref lookup tool.

Once an article has been crawled, its unique identifier (the DOI) is added to a list. This list is checked by the crawler at every runtime. Only articles that the crawler has not seen before are included in the data update. This ensures that articles appearing first online and then again in print are only included once on Paper Picnic.

When the title is generic, e.g., when it includes the word “Errata”, “Frontmatter” or “Backmatter”, the crawler adds a filter tag. For articles from multidisciplinary journals, the crawler prompts GPT-4o mini: “You are given content from a new issue of a multidisciplinary scientific journal. Respond ‘Yes’ if the content is a research article in any social science discipline and ‘No’ otherwise”. All content that includes this filter tag is hidden in the default view but can be displayed by clicking on the +N button at the top left for every journal.



Contribute

  1. Find and fix bugs or add new features to the crawler/web page. GitHub repository: github.com/sumtxt/paper-picnic.

  2. Use the crawled data for your own tool:

  3. Build a better (and equally open source) version of this page.

  4. Support The Initiative for Open Abstracts.