papers-dl is a command line application for downloading scientific papers.

# parse DOI identifiers from a file:
papers-dl parse -m doi --path pages/my-paper.html
# parse ISBN identifiers from a file, output matches as CSV:
papers-dl parse -m isbn --path pages/my-paper.html -f csv
# fetch paper with given identifier from any known provider:
papers-dl fetch "10.1016/j.cub.2019.11.030"
# fetch paper from any known Sci-Hub URL with verbose logging on, and store in "papers" directory:
papers-dl -v fetch -p "scihub" -o "papers" "10.1107/s0907444905036693"
# fetch paper from specific Sci-Hub URL:
papers-dl fetch -p "sci-hub.ee" "10.1107/s0907444905036693"
# fetch paper from SciDB (Anna's Archive):
papers-dl fetch -p "scidb" "10.1107/s0907444905036693"

papers-dl attempts to be a comprehensive tool for gathering research papers from popular open libraries. There are other solutions for this (see "Other tools" below), but papers-dl is trying to fill its own niche:

• comprehensive: other tools usually work with a single library, while papers-dl is trying to support a collection of popular libraries.
• performant: papers-dl tries to improve search and retrieval times by making use of concurrency where possible.

That said, papers-dl may not be the best choice for your specific use case right now. For example, if you require features supported by a specific library, one of the more mature and specialized tools listed below may be a better option.

papers-dl was initially created to serve as an extractor for ArchiveBox, a powerful solution for self-hosted web archiving.

This project started as a fork of scihub.py.

• Scidownl
• arxiv-dl
• Anna's Archive API

papers-dl's CLI is not yet stable.

Short-term roadmap:

parsing

• add support for parsing more identifier types like PMID and ISSN

fetching

• add support for downloading formats other than PDFs, like HTML or epub

searching

• add a CLI command for searching libraries for papers and metadata