python-autocite provides modules and a command line utility for automatically generating citiations of web pages.

Licensed under the MIT license. Though not required by the license, please consider dropping a line if you find this software useful.

Requirements:

• BeautifulSoup4
• Requests
• Dateutil
• Python 3
• (optional) pageres - for capturing screenshots

Run python setup.py install to install.

Command line usage:

Run autocite --help to see the help text.

Protip: Missing information will be filled in with "[[[field name]]]" which should make it easy to search for.

Currently only supports APA, but is extensible for other formats.

Using in other programs:

from python_autocite.lib import *

The modules available are:

• python_autocite.lib.datafinder.Datafinder - attempts to pull publication information from a BeautifulSoup soup
• python_autocite.lib.citation.Citation - Contains citation data, with intelligent setters
• python_autocite.lib.formatter.CitationFormatter - Interface for creating citation formatters
• python_autocite.lib.formatter.APAFormatter - formats a Citation into an APA citation

Cite a single URL:

autocite --url http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/12/report-data-caps-just-a-cash-cow-for-internet-providers/

This will print to stdout:

Anderson, N. (2012, December 18). Report: data caps just a “cash cow” for Internet providers. Retrieved June 18, 2017, from http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/12/report-data-caps-just-a-cash-cow-for-internet-providers/

Cite a list of URLs (newline separated), and save the citations to a file called citations.txt

autocite --from-file urllist.txt --to-text citations.txt

Optionally, you can add the --capture flag to capture screenshots of websites. This will not work for all websites, and may increase the time to generate citations significantly. Each capture will be stored in the current directory.

This software is not perfect and will make mistakes. Check that your citations are correct before using them for any important purpose.