PDFDataExtractor: A Tool for Reading Scientific Text and Interpreting Metadata from the Typeset Literature in the Portable Document Format

[Image: see text] The layout of portable document format (PDF) files is constant to any screen, and the metadata therein are latent, compared to mark-up languages such as HTML and XML. No semantic tags are usually provided, and a PDF file is not designed to be edited or its data interpreted by software. However, data held in PDF files need to be extracted in order to comply with open-source data requirements that are now government-regulated. In the chemical domain, related chemical and property data also need to be found, and their correlations need to be exploited to enable data science in areas such as data-driven materials discovery. Such relationships may be realized using text-mining software such as the “chemistry-aware” natural-language-processing tool, ChemDataExtractor; however, this tool has limited data-extraction capabilities from PDF files. This study presents the PDFDataExtractor tool, which can act as a plug-in to ChemDataExtractor. It outperforms other PDF-extraction tools for the chemical literature by coupling its functionalities to the chemical-named entity-recognition capabilities of ChemDataExtractor. The intrinsic PDF-reading abilities of ChemDataExtractor are much improved. The system features a template-based architecture. This enables semantic information to be extracted from the PDF files of scientific articles in order to reconstruct the logical structure of articles. While other existing PDF-extracting tools focus on quantity mining, this template-based system is more focused on quality mining on different layouts. PDFDataExtractor outputs information in JSON and plain text, including the metadata of a PDF file, such as paper title, authors, affiliation, email, abstract, keywords, journal, year, document object identifier (DOI), reference, and issue number. With a self-created evaluation article set, PDFDataExtractor achieved promising precision for all key assessed metadata areas of the document text.