hscells / apis-for-evidence-identification

Resources for the "Using APIs to help automate information retrieval for evidence identification" workshop at IRM 2024

Using APIs to help automate information retrieval for evidence identification

This invited workshop was part of IQWiG's Information Retrieval Meeting 2024

This is the supplementary material for the workshop. It includes interactive notebooks that you can execute in your browser. The notebooks let you edit and play with the code and data that are used in the workshop.

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More and more APIs (application programming interfaces) are used as programmatic interfaces for certain databases or data sets. This workshop explains what an API is and what knowledge is necessary to use them, for example:

• what APIs are and how they work
• offline versus online APIs
• using APIs via Python

The focus of this workshop is to present use cases especially for frequently used APIs. This workshop explains what API use cases exist, what they are used for and how information specialists can use them in their daily workflows.

Table of contents

Below contains the table of contents for the workshop. The interactive notebooks begin in Section 2.4. You can start anywhere and work your way through the material. At the bottom of each section are links back here, to the previous section, and to the next section.

1. What are APIs?

• 1.1 Conceptual Introduction to APIs
• 1.2 Limitations of APIs
• 1.3 Finding APIs

2. How to use APIs?

• 2.1 Data Formats
• 2.2 Authentication and Rate limits
• 2.3 Using APIs via HTTPie
• 2.4 Using APIs via Python

3. Use cases for APIs

• 3.1 Searching PubMed
• 3.2 Searching clinicaltrials.gov
• 3.3 Frequency Analysis
• 3.4 Replicating Yale MeSH Analyzer

Additional Resources

• APIs for beginners
• Python for data analysis
• Library Carpentry