These scripts use regular expressions to search for and extract a few key statistics from the raw text of journal articles. Code here is provided to accompany the paper titled Rising complexity and falling explanatory power in ecology (in prep), by Etienne Low-Décarie, Corey Chivers, and Monica Granados.

The script files are writen in BASH, so a *nix like environment is assumed. They should run on OSX, however they have only been tested on Ubuntu 12.04.

1. To use these scripts, you will first need to have all the articles of interest as plain text files. If starting with PDF documents, you can use pdftotext, or some other utility.

2. Place all .txt files in one folder.

3. To run, use:

$ ./extract_p.sh /path/to/folder/with/txt/files

Output files will be placed one folder above the .txt files folder. Outputs are csv files containing a list of all extracted values, one per line with the associated file name from which each was extracted.