This is a full archive of metadata about papers on arxiv.org from 1993-2018, including abstracts. Data is tidy and packed in TSV files, in two different collections of the total dataset: per year (all categories) and per primary category (all years). This archive also includes Jupyter notebooks for unpacking and analyzing it in python. See the README.md file and https://github.com/staeiou/arxiv_archive for more information.

Step 0: Query from arxiv.org

Arxiv's main permitted means of bulk downloading article metadata is through its OAI-PMH API. I used the oai-harvest program to download this, which stores the records in one XML file per paper, for a total of about 1.4 million files. These files are too large to be uploaded here.

Step 1: Process XML files

In the Jupyter notebook 1-process-xml-files.ipynb, the individual XML files are processed into a single large Pandas DataFrame, which is stored in TSV and pickle formats. These files are too large to be uploaded here.

Step 2: Process categories and output to per_year and per_category TSVs

In the Jupyter notebook 2-process-categories-out.ipynb, the large TSV file created in step 1 is parsed and separated into two different batched outputs. The processed_data/per_year folder contains one TSV file per year, compressed in .zip format. The processed_data/per_category contains one TSV file per Arxiv category, compressed in .xz format. Arxiv papers have primary and secondary categories (posting and cross-posting), and papers are in a category's dataset if they were either posted or cross-posted to that category.

Step 3: Export raw titles and abstracts

In the Jupyter notebook 3-abstracts-export.ipynb, the per_year datasets are unpacked and merged, then two sets of files are created for 1) just abstracts and 2) just titles, with one title or abstract per line. This creates zipped files for all items (too large to upload on GitHub) and a random sample of 250k items, which can be found in processed_data/DUMP_DATE/arxiv-abstracts-250k.txt.zip and processed_data/DUMP_DATE/arxiv-titles-250k.txt.zip.

Example usage Jupyter notebook

In the Jupyter notebook 4-analysis-examples.ipynb, the per_year datasets are unpacked and merged to one large dataframe, which is then analyzed in various ways. If you are looking to use this data to do an analysis on the entire Arxiv, you may find this notebook useful to start.

Data dictionary for full metadata files

These files are in processed_data/DUMP_DATE/per_year/YEAR.tsv.zip and processed_data/DUMP_DATE/per_category/CATEGORY_NAME.tsv.zip, with one row per line and tab-separated.