Dirty Script to count and graph PubMed hits per year for specific search

plotPubmed.py

import BeautifulSoup as bs
import requests
import pylab as pl


def countPubmed(searchterm, minyear, maxyear):
	quer = '%20'.join(searchterm.split(' '))
	N_res = []
	y = []
	for year in range(minyear, maxyear+1):
		y.append(year)
		page = requests.get('https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=((%22{0}%22%5BDate%20-%20Publication%5D%20%3A%20%22{0}%22%5BDate%20-%20Publication%5D))%20AND%20{1}'.format(str(year), quer))
		soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(page.content)
		q = soup.findAll('meta')
		t = 'ncbi_resultcount'

		for el in q:
			if el.attrs[0][1]==t:
				v = int(el.attrs[1][1])
		N_res.append(v)
	return y, N_res

## CHANGE THIS ################
search = "DTI Brain"
minyear = 1995
maxyear = 2017
###############################


y, v = countPubmed(search, minyear, maxyear)

pl.figure()
pl.plot(y, v)
pl.title('Pubmed Number of Hits for ({})'.format(search))
pl.show()