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Web scraping skills can boost your academic writing process in ways you never thought possible. And if you’re struggling to balance schoolwork and your private life? A research assistant can help you finish your urgent writing assignments on time. Best of all, you can find and hire one today. These professional essay writers work on a personal, one-to-one basis to understand your academic needs and offer solutions. Leveraging the power of scraping tools and an essay-writing assistant can make your school life so much easier. But what does web scraping entail?
Web Scraping for Academic Writing: What It Is
Web scraping entails using automated tools to crawl websites and extract specific information. It’s a powerful web research tool that academic writers can use to find relevant data for their research projects. The process relies on web data extraction scripts, most of which do not require any coding experience. Using these tools, you can extract files in the form of:
- Text
- Image
- Links
- Tables
- Forms
- HTML
- JSON
How to Get the Best Out of Web Scraping Tools
We’ve mentioned that web scrapers can enhance your academic research process. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of these tools:
- Choose your sources carefully. Remember the cardinal rule of research: Only obtain information from reputable sources. If you send your web scraper to an unreliable source, it will return unreliable data you can’t use. Get your information from reliable web sources instead.
- Respect the privacy settings of websites from which you extract info. Typically, you want to extract publicly accessible information only. Venturing into private data can cause a host of legal complications.
- Test the tool before deploying it to ensure that it works as it should. Remember to program the script correctly by specifying the exact information you want it to extract. Otherwise, you risk collecting irrelevant information.
- Monitor the web scraper tool for robustness and reliability. Keep checking that the script returns the type of content you’ve programmed it to find.
- Scrape during off-peak hours. Off-peak hours may be different for each website, depending on when consumers visit. During peak hours, demand from web visitors is high, and the CDNs are hard at work delivering content where it’s needed. Scraping the site when web traffic is so high can slow the crawling rate, so opt for off-peak extraction.
5 Key Ways Web Scraping Can Support Academic Writers
- It Provides an Effective Way to Comb Through a Massive Number of Sources
Scraping technology easily pulls out the information you need from thousands of web pages. Such a task is impossible to accomplish manually. If you were to do it manually, you would only extract a few pages of data in a day. This slow process limits the amount of data you can use in your research. With web extraction, however, you can access as much information as you need, which makes your research richer and broader. You can plan your research topic without worrying about how to source and compile the material you need.
- It Provides a Way to Gather Data Scattered Across Platforms
Like Studybay, your academic writing project likely requires you to use data from different sources. Not all these sources will have their information organized and structured in a palatable way. Scrapers can identify all the relevant data across different platforms and extract it for you. For instance, you may be looking to work with material from:
- Government databases
- Public and private schools
- Nonprofit organizations
- Online forums
- Social media
Web scrapers allow you to access and retrieve the information you need from all these sources, which would be tedious without automated web scraping tools. While some of the data you scrape from these sources will be high quality, others will be:
- Incomplete
- Inconsistent
- Inaccurate
They may also have typos, and some information may be missing. But this is not a problem because you won’t use the data collected as it is. The scrapers help you compile the material, and then you can analyze it and sort out what’s useful for your assignment and what’s not.
- It Can Help You Collect the Latest Data
One challenge academic writers face is finding adequate, up-to-date data. You can program your web scraper to find only the latest statistics for your writing project. This simple step eliminates the possibility of dealing with old, outdated data. And because the tool can access millions of web sources, you’re likely to collect enough information to support your argument or conduct sufficient research. Some web scraper tools are designed to collect data in real-time. Depending on what you’re working on, this ability to update results as new details become available can be a game-changer when collecting research material.
- Web Scrapers Allow You to Work with the Right Sample Size
We cannot undermine the importance of the sample size when conducting research. Research experts recommend a sample size that’s just right: not too small or too large. Not knowing where to find the subjects of interest or facing challenges in accessing them could result in few participants or limited observations for your study. Web crawler technology takes care of this problem. Likewise, you can cap the number of participants or observations to include in your project so the tools don’t collect more information than you need.
Importance of Using the Right Sample Size
In both cases, web scrapers help you attain adequate participants or observations for your research purposes. This level of control helps your research in numerous ways, such as:
- It reduces the likelihood of pushing false premises.
- Your study has sufficient power to conclude.
- It keeps the analysis power within a healthy range so that the results of your research are unlikely to be exaggerated or diminished.
- It Saves Time
Data collection can be excruciating when you don’t have the right tools to help you find and extract information. Data extraction technology eliminates the hard part of the equation, extracting relevant information within a fraction of the time it would take to extract details from the web without any automated tools. For an academic writer, this faster solution means you have more time to pore over the research results, analyze them carefully, and come up with a comprehensive report.
Bonus Benefit of Web Scraping for Academic Writers
It’s Cost-Effective
Gathering data can be expensive, especially when you have to go from one location to another, conduct interviews, or facilitate focus groups. Web data extraction provides a convenient way to access the information you need for your research without spending tons of money. Some web scrapers are free, a good option for when your budget is tight. Investing in a web scraper may make sense if you anticipate writing many academic papers in the future. Make no mistake: The free options are just as effective, but paid tools often have more features that a regular user might find invaluable.
Conclusion
As an academic writer, you can use scraping scripts to improve your research process. Scraping gives you access to thousands of public data sources, which would take you days, even weeks and months, to gather in person. Web scraper tools can be free or paid, so you can find an option that suits you best.
