How to Scrape Websites to Do Academic Research?

Scraping websites for academic research can save you from tedious procedure of physically scraping data. This blog tells you How to Scrape Websites to Do Academic Research.

June 15, 2022

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It’s general that a lot of industries are utilizing collected data from data scraping in making data-driven decisions about business strategies. Although less known fact is that academic researchers could also utilize web scraping for collecting data they want for the projects. In recent problems of the Nature, many protruding researchers shared about how they utilize web scraping for streamlining their research procedure as well as better allocating their sources.

Scraping websites for academic research can save you from tedious procedure of physically scraping data. In a case given in the Nature article, many researchers have experienced a 40-fold rise in the rates at which they have increased the data collection. The time savings gives you more time in devoting your research instead of relatively mindless job of data entry. Here, we’ll discuss about scraping websites for academic research as well as all you require to understand to begin.

How to Do Academic Research with Web Scraping?

Web scraping uses an automated program for scraping publicly-accessible data from the website. Different web scrapers analyze texts on the website as well as look for particular data, normally using different HTML tags. After that, they extract data as well as export it in the usable formats like JSON or CSV file. You could utilize a ready-made web scraper like 3i Data Scraping data scraper or create your own with any contemporary programming language.

Whenever you program a data scraper for any particular job, you can use it again to update or recapture the data given that a website’s structure doesn’t modify much. Sharing a database as well as scraping results using others increases the opportunities for partnership. This also makes that easier for the others to repeat the results, which is very important in the academic research.

Use Cases: Academic Research Using Web Scraping

The probable use cases for web scraping for academic research are nearly unlimited. Healthcare is amongst the most evident use cases. We all know that the internet is the most wide-ranging database created ever. More interactions and human activities are taking place online and leaving data traces behind. Healthcare researchers could utilize this data for different objectives like:

Create disease vectors
Define what behavioral factors are related with any particular disease or illness
Define what risk factors are closely related with different results in patients
Forecast the results of medical treatments and procedures

One more academic use case of web scraping is in the ecology field. The academic journal called ‘Trends in Ecology and Evolution’ gives various ecological insights, which could be increased by harnessing power of data using the internet. Those include:

Animal and plant life changes
Climate changes
Development of traits
Practical roles played by different species in the ecosystems
Species existences
The study of seasonal and cyclic natural phenomena

All these are only a few examples amongst different possibilities. Web scraping could be an ideal solution if collecting data manually slows your school project or academic research.

Ethics of Extracting Websites for Academic Research

You need to remember some right considerations in case you try and determine if data scraping for school projects is right. Initially, you need to talk to your professor or teacher if you get any concerns about whether they might approve. Or else, it’s completely right if you follow the well-established best practices to do web scraping. They include:

Checking the APIs First

Before scraping a website, check if data you want is accessible on the public APIs.

Extract When Traffic Volume is lower

You don’t need to interfere with a website’s usual function, therefore try and extract when a site’s usual traffic volume gets the lowest. This might indicate setting a program to extract in the middle of a night or throughout the offseason in case a website experiences a huge volume of regular traffic.

Limiting Your Requests

Web data scrapers are extremely effective as they are much quicker than humans. However, you don’t need to overload servers of websites you’re extracting, therefore you’ll have to slow the data scraper down by controlling your requests.

Only Get the Required Data

Don’t get all the data as lots of data available and you can take any! Limit your data requests, which you require for research.

Follow Directions

Check the robots.txt file of a website, terms of services, and other instructions about web scraping. A few websites prohibit data scraping, and a few limit how quickly or when you could scrape.

Avoid Hurdles While Doing Academic Research with Web Scraping

Even websites that welcome data scrapers might have settings, which can restrict with the web scraper. The majority of websites block IP addresses of any users, who look to be a bot. The coolest way of spotting a bot is through noting how quickly it sends requests. Though you won’t use your data scraper at complete speed, this will be quicker than any human user.

The coolest way of avoiding IP bans is through using the academic proxy. These proxies protect your actual IP addresses through attaching the proxy IP addresses to request. You would require a revolving pool of different proxies for scraping effectively. Every request would be sent using different proxy IPs.

You will have many kinds of proxies to be used for data scraping:

Data Center Proxies

Data center proxies create in the data center, as well as they’re the discounted, most accessible kind of proxies you could purchase. Data center proxies are quicker than housing proxies.

The largest downside for data center proxies is, they’re easily recognizable by websites. As majority of users don’t use the internet having data center IP addresses, it raises the red flags for different anti-bot software.

Residential Proxies

Residential proxies are given by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to the users. It is similar kind of IP address you get at home, as well as it’s the kind of IP addresses most people utilize for using the internet, therefore it has ample authority. Residential proxies are very good proxies to utilize for data scraping. Although they’re slower than different options including ISP proxies.

ISP Proxies

ISP proxies are obstruct between residential proxies as well as data center, the finest of both the worlds. ISPs provide them, however they get housed in the data centers. They trust the data center proxy speed as well as the ability of residential proxies. At 3i Data Scraping, we partner with leading ISPs like Comcast and Verizon to offer maximum redundancy and diversity. If bans take place, we’ll switch to completely different ASNs so that you can back to work.

Conclusion

Web scraping has become a valuable and accepted part of organizing academic research. This helps you utilize your time powerfully through automating the job of collecting data. It could be utilized in nearly all academic fields for an extensive range of projects.

You have to make sure the websites you extract are authoritative and reliable sources for data as well as follow rules of ethical data scraping, therefore you don’t adversely impact those websites. In case, you follow website’s extraction instructions, avoid extraction during highest traffic times, as well as utilize proxies for avoiding bans, extracting websites to do academic research would increase your effectiveness and improve results. Contact us today to find out how 3i Data Scraping can assist in simplifying your research.