Python script to automatically download metadata about research papers, starting with some paper and transitively downloading the most relevant papers, from ACM digital library.

Do not try to modify the script to download many documents in parallel; at some point the dl.acm.org site will notice this and temporarily block your IP.

• Download and install the latest release of Python 3.
• Install the requests library: run the command pip3 install requests.

Run using the command line python acmdownload.py.

Search for a paper on dl.acm.org and go to its page. For example the page for the paper "Spanner: Google's globally-distributed database" from OSDI'12 has the url https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2387880.2387905. The DOI is the string 10.5555/2387880.2387905.

Change the doi global variable in the script to the DOI for your paper. The documents_to_download global variable is the total number of documents to include in the set before ranking them according to number of references from within the set.