Web scraping, the practice of automating the collection of data from websites, is a key part of how the internet functions, and it is an increasingly important part of the research tool kit for scientists, cultural resources professionals, and journalists. There are few resources intended to train archaeologists in how to develop web scrapers. Perhaps more importantly, there are also few resources that outline the normative, ethical, and legal frameworks within which scraping of archaeological data is situated. This article is intended to introduce archaeologists to web scraping as a research method, as well as to outline the norms concerning scraping that have evolved since the 1990s, and the current state of US legal frameworks that touch on the practice. These norms and legal frameworks continue to evolve, representing an opportunity for archaeologists to become more involved in how scraping is practiced and how it should be regulated in the future.

A stream of research on co-authorship, used as a proxy of scholars’ collaborative behavior, focuses on members of a given scientific community defined at discipline and/or national basis for which co-authorship data have to be retrieved. Recent literature pointed out that international digital libraries provide partial coverage of the entire scholar scientific production as well as under-coverage of the scholars in the community. Bias in retrieving co-authorship data of the community of interest can affect network construction and network measures in several ways, providing a partial picture of the real collaboration in writing papers among scholars. In this contribution, we collected bibliographic records of Italian academic statisticians from an online platform (IRIS) available at most universities. Even if it guarantees a high coverage rate of our population and its scientific production, it is necessary to deal with some data quality issues. Thus, a web scraping procedure based on a semi-automatic tool to retrieve publication metadata, as well as data management tools to detect duplicate records and to reconcile authors, is proposed. As a result of our procedure, it emerged that collaboration is an active and increasing practice for Italian academic statisticians with some differences according to the gender, the academic ranking, and the university location of scholars. The heuristic procedure to accomplish data quality issues in the IRIS platform can represent a working case report to adapt to other bibliographic archives with similar characteristics.

Interactions between the Sumatran tiger Panthera tigris sumatrae and people (e.g. injury or loss of lives of people and tigers, evacuation of injured tigers, loss of livestock and sightings of tigers) can negatively affect the conservation of the subspecies. Land-use change in Sumatra has reduced habitat for tigers, forcing them into human-dominated landscapes and increasing the probability of interactions with people. Although the number of such interactions is high in South-east Asia, few studies have been published since 2000 and for Sumatra there is a lack of information regarding where these events occur. We collated data on human–tiger interactions in the province of Riau using web scraping of news sources published during 2010–2020, and mapped these data to village boundaries. We recorded 101 interaction events, with a total of 107 interactions, which we categorized into seven types (people injured or killed, livestock killed, sightings of tigers, tigers killed, injured or evacuated), in 78 villages. Most interactions with reported locations occurred close to settlements (35%), followed by in plantations (26%) and smallholdings (25%), with forests and forest edges comprising 14% of such events. Interactions were dominated by sightings of tigers, but severe interaction types (human death or injury and attacks on livestock) were also reported. The mean annual number of human–tiger interactions was 4.6 during 2011–2017 and 21.3 during 2017–2020. We highlight the need for mitigation and prevention, such as establishing conflict mitigation teams, improving animal husbandry practices, and providing training and education on human–tiger interactions focused in plantations and settlements.