EnviroMetaAnalysis

The EnviroMetaAnalysis study queries journal articles published between 2013-2023 from a subset of journals related to the Environmental Science to explore the trends in environmental research around the world. These metadata were gathered from OpenAlex, stored on a MongoDB server, and analyzed with Python using Jupyter notebooks.

This project is designed to support the International Panel on Chemical Pollution, established as part of United Nations Environment Assembly resolution 5/8. This work is completed through the Indiana University FADS Summer 2023 program for the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.

Program Operation

The src folder contains a script, alex2mongo.py, to query journal article metadata from OpenAlex and write them into local MongoDB server as a document for each article. To save some time and start working with this dataset directly, one can undertake the following steps:

1. Install Docker
2. Acquire db.tar.gz from project admin and save it to the ./data/ directory
3. From the ./data/ directory run the following command to extract the MongoDB database files:

tar xzf db.tar.gz db

4. Build the container with the following command from this root EnviroMetaAnalysis directory:

docker run -d --name mongodb_fads \
  -v <absolute-path-to-repo>/EnviroMetaAnalysis/data/db:/data/db \
  -p 27017:27017 mongo:latest

This will create and run a Docker container running MongoDB with the queried data from OpenAlex. The data is reachable at this URI: mongodb://localhost:27017, in the journals collection of the OpenAlexEnvironmental database.

Conceptual Overview

flowchart TB
    
    subgraph G["Data Source"]
        oa[("OpenAlex\nAPI")]
    end

    oa--query OpenAlex--> inbound
    
    inbound[[./src/alex2mongo.py]]

    inbound--write new records-->B    
    
    compose[docker run]--create container-->B

    subgraph B["Docker Container"]
        mongo[("Mongo Server\nlocalhost:27017")]
        volume(["MongoDB Volume\n./data/db"])
        volume<-->mongo
    end
    
    B--query MongoDB-->C;

    subgraph C["Visualizations"]
        stats(("Statistics\nWordCloud\nPlots and Graphs"))
    end