Pyinspire - Python script to access INSPIRE database

The new INSPIRE HEP database has been up and running for a while now, and is going from strength to strength (despite some recent wobbles concerning citation counts).

I recently needed to get the BibTeX entries for a few papers and instead of copy-pasting from the results web page each time I wondered whether a more programmatic solution existed. There used to be a few utilities for SPIRES which enabled you to get results using a script but I haven’t seen any that do this with INSPIRE (although there is a plugin for Jabref).

I decided to cook up a quick script called pyinspire that will send INSPIRE a query and scrape the resulting page for results. It is available now in the Python Package Index with the source code on Bitbucket. I’ve released it under a modified BSD license so feel free to fork. Installation is as easy as pip install pyinspire or easy_install pyinspire.

The functionality is very basic at the moment but does include output in BibTeX, LaTeX(EU) and LaTeX(US) modes, and standard text output including citation counts. See the Bitbucket page for more details.