Academic research is a type of investigation that college students and professors do. It can be used to develop new theories and practical applications in fields like medicine and engineering. For academic research, you need access to many different sources. You may need to find out what has been learned about a certain subject or how many people are affected by a certain disease.
You can find this information in many ways, but web scraping is one of the best.
This post will explain how to use web scraping for academic research, its advantages and downsides, and how to overcome them.
How to use web scraping for Academic Research
Web scraping is a powerful tool for academic research. It is the process of copying information from websites and storing it in a database. Web scraping can be used to find almost anything, from the weather to how many people visit a website.
Academic research is collecting and analyzing information about a subject to learn more about it. Academics can use it to answer questions, and think tanks like the US Census Bureau can use it to help them decide on policy.
To do this work, researchers must look for online data to quickly gather facts and figures that will help them understand their topic. Web scraping makes it easier for them to do this than before. This speeds up the process of collecting data and saves energy for analyzing it.
This is especially important at universities, where professors often don’t have much time to do research themselves but still want their students to learn about new topics as they come up. Scholars who work alone on a paper or project for school can also use web scraping tools. This way, they can spend more time analyzing the data and less time trying to gather it all by hand.
Manual Data Collection Vs. Web Scraping
Manual data collection and web scraping are two ways to collect information for academic research.
Manual data collection is a time-consuming and costly process for academic research. When you need to collect a lot of information, you usually have to put it into a spreadsheet or database by hand. This can be hard, especially if you gather a lot of information from different sources.
Web scraping is an automated data collection from websites and other online sources. It involves creating software that automatically gets the information you need from a website, puts it into a file, and saves it in the format you want.
Web scraping is helpful for academic research. It lets you gather a lot of data quickly and easily without copying and pasting each piece of information into a spreadsheet or database manually. Web scraping also lets you get information from more than one source at once. You don’t have to type in the same information over and over again.
Advantages of using web scraping for Academic Research
When doing academic research, you need to ensure that your methods are sound and that you have the data to back up your conclusions.
Scraping the web can get the information you need for your paper or thesis. Here are some of the reasons why academic research should use web scraping:
Speed
There’s no time to waste when you’re doing research. Web scraping is quick and can get you the data you need so you can move on to the next part of your project. It saves you time, which is very important when you have a tight deadline.
Convenience
When you scrape the web, you don’t have to spend time searching for the information you want and downloading it from different sources. Instead, an algorithm does all the work for you. It searches for the data at the same time on many different websites and then puts it all in one place where you can see the results.
Cost
Web scraping can be a great choice because it’s cheap and can give you a lot of information. It lets you get data from sources that would be hard or impossible to get to otherwise. This could include private or proprietary sites, which you must go through official channels or pay a lot of money and time to access.
Accuracy
Web scraping lets you get the most accurate information possible. The problem with using other methods of gathering data is that they are often not as reliable.
Web scrapers can be set up to get information directly from web pages, so they don’t have to rely on people to type it in or provide links to other sources. This gives you access to the latest information that is available.
Are there downsides to web scraping?
Web scraping is legal as long as you follow international laws and the terms of service for the website you want to scrape. But there are still risks to watch out for.
When you scrape a website, the biggest risk is that the target website will block you. If your computer sends too many requests, the website server you want to visit may notice and block it. Most of the time, web scraping bots are banned because they are thought to be malicious.
How to avoid getting blocked when web scraping?
Web scraping tools make getting a lot of information easy and quick. However, they’re also one of the things that bother web developers the most. Many sites have teams that work to stop scrapers from taking information from their pages. These teams use a wide range of methods to stop or slow down scrapers.
Using a proxy server is the best way to avoid getting blocked. A proxy server is a middleman between your computer and the site you want to visit. When you use the proxy server, the website only sees the proxy server’s IP address, not yours. This keeps them from finding out that you are scraping their site and keeps them from getting too many requests for traffic from bots like you.
There are several types of proxies you can use for web scraping:
Datacenter Proxies
They come from a different company and give you privacy and a private IP address.
Datacenter Proxies come from data centers and cloud hosting services, and many people use them at the same time. Websites can easily find them because they are not listed as ISPs. Most people don’t connect to the internet using IP addresses from data centers. This sends a red flag to software that tries to stop bots.
Residential Proxies
Residential Proxies use real IP addresses given to homeowners by their ISPs. Because these IP addresses are tied to real, physical devices, using them makes it easy to copy natural human behavior.
Residential proxies work the same way as servers in a data center. They hide your actual IP address by sending your internet traffic and requests through a server with a different IP address. So, the website you are on won’t be able to connect your actions to your actual IP address.
There are two types of residential proxies:
Static Residential Proxies
This proxy stays connected to the same IP address unless you disconnect it or switch to a different server.
Rotating Residential Proxies
This type of proxy changes the IP address on its own based on rules you set, like every few minutes.
No matter what type of proxy you choose, avoid using free proxies. They often say “unlimited” or “unblocked” in their ads, but their speeds are slow and don’t let you scrape too much information at once. Also, spammers and other malicious actors often use free proxies, so the sites you want to scrape data from are more likely to flag them as suspicious.
Conclusion
When you’re in an academic setting, you’ll often be tasked with research. This might mean you must find information on a specific topic and use it to complete your assignment or create a presentation. You might also want to do your research instead of relying on what someone else has done but you don’t know how to do it.
Web scraping is useful for academic research, no matter the situation. It can be a great way to make your life a little easier. You can find the data you need in various ways and then use it to help you complete your research project.
The key is to use it wisely and know how to avoid getting blocked when web scraping using proxies.
