text:
How to export Google Scholar keyword search results to Excel?
I am looking for a reputable free tool to export results of a keyword search on Google Scholar to Microsoft Word or Excel.
I am in the process of assembling a reading list for systematic literature review. In Google Scholar, I get 276 results for my keyword search. I need to perform and record two culls firstly on title, then on abstract reading, leaving myself with a potential reading list.
I would like to do this in Excel or Word, if possible. I found an article in the Search Engine Journal, recommending "SEO PowerSuite", but the article is from 2009 and my antivirus software is recommending not running the downloaded executable.
I am very new to research, so could you point me in the right direction of discovering and using reputable free tools that would allow me to export my Google Scholar keyword search results?

Some antiviruses enter in paranoid mode and would recommend not running almost anything, unless it comes signed by Microsoft or one other big company. If you think you got the program from a reputable web, it is likely to be safe, but you can run it in a virtual machine to be safer.

Ok thanks David, I did wonder about that. I would have expected the Search Engine Journal to be fairly reputable!

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it belongs to softwarerecs.stackexchange.com

Thanks for the steer @adipro, I was still reasonably new to stack exchange and mainly using stack overflow when I asked the question.

@Hilary, yes, actually the response rate here might be better.

I think this question is a reasonably good fit for this site, and I don't really get the "shopping" close reason. Voting to reopen.

Check out Publish or Perish. You can run keyword queries on Google Scholar from there, and export the results to .csv, which you can later open from Excel

do you know for web of science?

The Web of Science lets you export data as a tabulated text file. After you make any query in Web of Science Core Collection, you click on the dropdown menu located before the first result, select Save to Other File Formats, then you select the fields you want (the easiest way is to select full record), then the format (tab-delimited). You can export up to 500 records in one go, so if you need more you can do 1-500, 501-1000... then you can import those files to Excel, and merge all results in a single file.

I saw at some conferences, and demonstration, that researchers make histograms of topic published per year. For example, pervoskite, or hiv vaccine or Dl mutation etc, and then you see brake of keywords, or topic, published per year. number of articles in one period of time. Is this possible?

I do not know a tool for that, but I suggest the following, having Excel in Windows:
1. Write your queries (keywords) in the A column in a sheet of the document
2. Hit Alt+F11 to open Vba editor, then click with the mouse right button on the left panel in VBAProject, then, insert module.
3. Copy and paste the code (see below) in the module blank space.
4. Go to the "Tools" menu, "references", and select: Microsoft Internet controls, Microsoft HTML object library AND Microsoft VBscripts Regular Expressions 5.5. Use Ctrl+G to open progress window.
5. Put the cursor in the code after Sub..., click on the play button up in the module (code) window or hit F5 to run it.
6. It is recommendend to open Internet Explorer before running (can be closed again) or use Browser.Visible = True the first time you use it.
An option to get doi numbers was added, look for the button after searching.
'Go to the Tools menu, references, and select Microsoft Internet controls,
'Microsoft HTML object library AND Microsoft VBscripts Regular Expressions 5.5.
Public t As Range ' variables used in several subs
Public btn As Button
Public myproxy As Variant
Public Function Ceiling(ByVal X As Double, Optional ByVal Factor As Double = 1) As Double
Ceiling = (Int(X / Factor) - (X / Factor - Int(X / Factor) > 0)) * Factor
End Function
Sub scholargooglegetresults() '
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Call main
' IMPORTANT               IMPORTANT             IMPORTANT
' CLICK THE PLAY BUTTON HAVING CURSOR here AND YOUR QUERIES ON COLUMN A
Application.SendKeys "%{F11}"
ActiveWindow.Zoom = 60
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
Range("D4").Select
End Sub
Sub main()
Dim Browser As InternetExplorer
Dim Document As IHTMLDocument
Dim DElements As IHTMLElementCollection
Dim DElement As IHTMLElement
Dim DElements2 As IHTMLElementCollection
Dim DElement2 As IHTMLElement
Dim DElements3 As IHTMLElementCollection
Dim DElement3 As IHTMLElement
Dim strIn As String
Dim objRegex2 As Object
Dim myValue As Variant
Dim crange As Range
Dim arr
Dim arraya(), a As Long
Set Browser = New InternetExplorer
Browser.Visible = False '                       <- Browser visibility
ActiveSheet.Buttons.Delete
lastRow = Range("A" & Rows.Count).End(xlUp).Row
myValue = InputBox("Consider it takes approx 2 sec per result (cite), 100 cites = 200 secs", "How many results per query ?", 1)
If StrPtr(myValue) = False Then
MsgBox ("Alt F11 to show vba editor!")
Exit Sub
End If
If IsNumeric(myValue) = False Then
MsgBox ("Please fill a number!")
Exit Sub
Else
myNumber = Ceiling(myValue / 10) * 10
Application.SendKeys "%{F11}"
timeest = (myNumber * lastRow * 2.2) '
MsgBox ("Click ok and wait approx. " & timeest & " seconds!, you will see this sheet again filled"), 0, ("Click ok and be patient")
End If
ActiveSheet.Columns(3).ClearContents
Range("C10") = 0
Range("C10").Select
Selection.DataSeries Rowcol:=xlColumns, Type:=xlLinear, Date:=xlDay, _
Step:=10, Stop:=myValue - 1, Trend:=False
lastrow2 = ActiveSheet.Cells(Rows.Count, "C").End(xlUp).Row
ActiveSheet.Range("C10:C" & lastrow2).Select
If Selection.Cells.Count > 1 Then
arr = Join(Application.Transpose(Selection.Value), ",")
Range("C9") = arr
For a = 0 To UBound(Split(arr, ","))
ReDim Preserve arraya(a)
arraya(a) = CInt(Split(arr, ",")(a))
Next a
Else
arr = 0
ReDim Preserve arraya(a)
arraya(a) = arr
End If
c = 1
k = 6
Cells(1, k - 2).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 20
Cells(1, k - 1).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 20
Cells(1, k + 1).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 20
Cells(1, k).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 25
Cells(1, k + 2).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 20
Cells(1, k + 3).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 20
Cells(1, k + 4).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 75
Cells(1, k + 5).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 75
Cells(1, k + 6).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 25
Cells(1, k + 7).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 25
Cells(1, 1).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 21 ' changing width of columns to visualize better
Cells(1, 2).EntireColumn.ColumnWidth = 25
For i = 1 To lastRow ' for every of your queries in column A
j = 0
Url = "https://scholar.google.com"
Browser.navigate Url
Do While Browser.Busy And Not Browser.readyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE
DoEvents
Loop
Set Document = Browser.Document
'Application.Wait (Now + TimeValue("0:00:07")) 'was 7
Application.Wait (Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, WorksheetFunction.RandBetween(15, 25)))
Document.all.q.Value = Cells(i, 1)
Do While Browser.Busy And Not Browser.readyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE
DoEvents
Loop
Set Elements = Document.getElementsByTagName("button")
For Each Element In Elements
If Element.Type = "submit" Then
Element.Click
Exit For
End If
Next Element
Do While Browser.Busy And Not Browser.readyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE
DoEvents
Loop
For a = LBound(arraya) To UBound(arraya)
Debug.Print arraya(a) + 10 & " Results obtained for: "" " & Cells(i, 1) & " "" Wait please "
Set Elements = Document.getElementsByClassName("gs_btnPR gs_in_ib gs_btn_half")
For Each Element In Elements
If Element.Type = "button" Then
Element.Click
Exit For
End If
Application.Wait (Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, WorksheetFunction.RandBetween(15, 25)))
Next Element
Do While Browser.Busy And Not Browser.readyState = READYSTATE_COMPLETE
DoEvents
Loop
Application.Wait (Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, WorksheetFunction.RandBetween(15, 25)))
Set DElements = Document.getElementById("gs_res_ccl_mid").getElementsByClassName("gs_r gs_or gs_scl") ' gsri
If DElements.Length = 0 Then
Exit For
End If
For Each DElement In DElements
c = c + 1 '+ '((myNumber) * (i - 1)) ' number of row with author and year
j = j + 1 '+ (myNumber * i - 1) ' result number
On Error Resume Next
Set DElements2 = DElement.getElementsByTagName("div")
For Each DElement2 In DElements2
If DElement2.className = "gs_a" Then
Cells(c, k + 1) = DElement2.innerText 'author year
Cells(c, k + 2).FormulaR1C1 = "=IF(ISNUMBER(VALUE(IFERROR(MID(RC[-1], FIND(""19"",RC[-1]), 4),"""")))=TRUE,IF(VALUE(IFERROR(MID(RC[-1], FIND(""19"",RC[-1]), 4),""""))>=1900,IFERROR(MID(RC[-1], FIND(""19"",RC[-1]), 4),""""),IF(ISNUMBER(VALUE(IFERROR(MID(RC[-1], FIND(""20"",RC[-1]), 4),"""")))=TRUE,IF(VALUE(IFERROR(MID(RC[-1], FIND(""20"",RC[-1]), 4),""""))>=2000,IFERROR(MID(RC[-1], FIND(""20"",RC[-1]), 4),""""),""year not detected""),""year not detected"")),IF(ISNUMBER(VALUE(IFERROR(MID(RC[-1], FIND(""20"",RC[-1]), 4),"""")))=TRUE,IF(VALUE(IFERROR(MID(RC[-1], FIND(""20"",RC[-1]), 4),""""))>=2000,IFERROR(MID(RC[-1], FIND(""20"",RC[-1]), 4),""""),""year not detected""),""year not detected""))" ' formula to get year from string
Cells(c, k + 2).Value = Cells(c, k + 2).Value ' eliminate formula, leave year as number
Cells(c, k - 2) = Cells(i, 1).Value ' search
Cells(c, k - 1) = j ' result number
Cells(c, k + 3).FormulaR1C1 = "=RIGHT(LEFT(RC[-2],FIND("" "",RC[-2],(FIND("" "",RC[-2],1))+1)-1),(FIND("" "",RC[-2],(FIND("" "",RC[-2],1))+1)-FIND("" "",RC[-2],1))-1)" ' "=RIGHT(RC[-2],SEARCH("" "",RC[-2])-1)"   'concatenate(RC[+1],R[+1]C[+1],R[+2]C[+1],R[+3]C[+1],R[+4]C[+1])"
'   ElseIf DElement2.className = "gs_md_wp gs_ttss" Then
ElseIf DElement2.className = "gs_ggs gs_fl" Then ' gs_ggs gs_fl
Set link = DElement2.getElementsByTagName("a")(0)
Cells(c, k + 6) = link.href ' link to pdf
Set link = Null
ElseIf DElement2.className = "gs_rs" Then ' text big
Cells(c, k + 5) = DElement2.innerText
End If
Next
Set DElements3 = DElement.getElementsByTagName("h3")
For Each DElement3 In DElements3
If DElement3.className = "gs_rt" Then
Cells(c, k + 4) = DElement3.innerText
strIn = Cells(c, k + 4).Text
Set objRegex2 = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
With objRegex2
.Global = True
.Pattern = "\[\w*\]\s?"
If .test(strIn) Then
    Cells(c, k + 4).Value = .Replace(strIn, vbNullString) ' eliminate [HTML] [PDF] strings
End If
End With
Set link = DElement3.getElementsByTagName("a")(0)
Cells(c, k + 7) = link.href
Set link = Null
End If
Next ' DElement3
Next 'DElement
Next ' for url
Next
Set Document = Nothing
Set Browser = Nothing
Cells(1, 2) = "Each time each type of sort button is clicked, changes from Ascending to Descending" ' additional help
Cells(2, 2) = "PDF and IExplorer Issues:"
Cells(3, 2) = "https://www.itsupportguides.com/windows-7/adobe-pdfs-wont-open-in-internet-explorer/"
Cells(4, 2) = "https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/epm-support-acrobat-products.html"
Cells(8, 2) = "https://gen.lib.rus.ec"
Cells(9, 2) = "Search dois in crossref (wait 1.5 seconds per ref)"
Cells(10, 2) = "Use dois to get .bib refs,"
Cells(11, 2) = "as in:"
Cells(12, 2) = "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1781672/convert-bibliographic-references-from-a-document-into-bibtex-or-endnote/39820830#39820830"
Cells(13, 2) = "Beggining in step 4."
Range("A1").Resize(Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlRows, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Row, _
Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Column).Select ' selecting all to wrap text
With Selection
.WrapText = True
End With
With ActiveSheet
Range("B1").Select
lastrow3 = ActiveSheet.Cells(Rows.Count, "B").End(xlUp).Row
ActiveSheet.Range("B1:B" & lastrow3).Select
For Each xCell In Selection
If InStr(1, xCell.Value, "http") > 0 Then
ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Add anchor:=xCell, Address:=xCell.Value
End If
Next xCell
End With
Call research
Call header
End Sub
Sub header() ' create headers in first row
lastRow = Range("A" & Rows.Count).End(xlUp).Row
k = 6 '7 * i - 2 ' k refers to column corresponding to i - your query
Cells(1, k) = "Order by your notes" '  main column title (button text)
Cells(1, k - 2) = "your search" ' year column title (button text)
Cells(1, k - 1) = "Button to Reset to original ordering" '  main column title (button text)
Cells(1, k + 1) = "Authors, year, editor" ' year column title (button text)
Cells(1, k + 2) = " Button - use to order by YEAR" ' year column title (button text)
Cells(1, k + 3) = "First author" ' year column title (button text)
Cells(1, k + 4) = "Title" ' year column title (button text)
Cells(1, k + 5) = "text" ' year column title (button text)
Cells(1, k + 6) = " Link 1" ' year column title (button text)
Cells(1, k + 7) = " Link 2" ' year column title (button text)
Cells(1, k + 9) = " dois, after using crossref button" ' year column title (button text)
Range(Cells(1, 3), Cells(1, 3)).EntireColumn.Hidden = True 'cells in "C" used for ordering purposes hidden
Range("A1").Resize(Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlRows, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Row, _
Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Column).Select ' selecting all to wrap text
With Selection
.WrapText = True
End With
Rows("2:2").Select ' to freeze top row
ActiveWindow.FreezePanes = True
' to Reset to original ordering" CREATING BUTTON
Set t = ActiveSheet.Cells(1, k - 1)
Set btn = ActiveSheet.Buttons.Add(t.Left + 5, t.Top + 5, t.Width - 7, t.Height - 7)
With btn
.OnAction = "sortbyscholarorder"
.Caption = Cells(1, k - 1).Value
.Name = "sortbyscholarorder" & 1 & k - 1
End With
' to dois " CREATING BUTTON
Set t = ActiveSheet.Cells(9, 2)
Set btn = ActiveSheet.Buttons.Add(t.Left + 5, t.Top + 5, t.Width - 7, t.Height - 7)
With btn
.OnAction = "cross"
.Caption = Cells(9, 2).Value
.Name = "cross" & 9 & 2
End With
'  use to order by YEAR" CREATING BUTTON
Set t = ActiveSheet.Cells(1, k + 2)
Set btn = ActiveSheet.Buttons.Add(t.Left + 5, t.Top + 5, t.Width - 7, t.Height - 7)
With btn
.OnAction = "sortbyyear"
.Caption = Cells(1, k + 2).Value
.Name = "sortbyyear" & 1 & k + 2
End With
' order BY your notes
Set t = ActiveSheet.Cells(1, k)
Set btn = ActiveSheet.Buttons.Add(t.Left + 5, t.Top + 5, t.Width - 7, t.Height - 7)
With btn
.OnAction = "orderbynotes"
.Caption = Cells(1, k).Value
.Name = "orderbynotes" & 1 & k
End With
Set t = Cells(5, 2)
Set btn = ActiveSheet.Buttons.Add(t.Left + 2, t.Top + 2, t.Width - 2, t.Height - 2)
With btn
.OnAction = "modifylinks"
.Caption = "Add proxy, e.g. sci-hub"
.Name = "addproxy"
End With
Set t = Cells(6, 2)
Set btn = ActiveSheet.Buttons.Add(t.Left + 2, t.Top + 2, t.Width - 2, t.Height - 2)
With btn
.OnAction = "removeproxy"
.Caption = "remove proxy in links"
.Name = "removeproxybutton"
End With
With ActiveSheet
Range("L1").Resize(Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlRows, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Row, _
Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Column).Select
For Each xCell In Selection ' transforming cell content with link info to working hyperlinks
If InStr(1, xCell.Text, "researchgate.net/profile") > 0 Then
ElseIf InStr(1, xCell.Value, "http") > 0 Then
ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Add anchor:=xCell, Address:=xCell.Value
ElseIf InStr(1, xCell.Value, "ftp://") > 0 Then
ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Add anchor:=xCell, Address:=xCell.Value
End If
Next xCell
End With
Range("A1").Select
End Sub
Sub ResetFilters()
On Error Resume Next
ActiveSheet.ShowAllData
End Sub
Sub sortbyyear() 'action taken by the sort by year button
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Call ResetFilters
Dim buttonrow As Long, buttonrange As Range, buttonrangeresized As Range
buttonrow = ActiveSheet.Buttons(Application.Caller).TopLeftCell.Row
buttoncolumn = ActiveSheet.Buttons(Application.Caller).TopLeftCell.Column
Set buttonrange = ActiveSheet.Range(Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn), Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn)) ' range with coordinates of clicked button
buttonrange.Select
Selection.Resize(1, 12).Select ' expand range to be sorted
Selection.Offset(0, -4).Select
Selection.EntireColumn.Select
Set buttonrangeresized = Selection
ActiveSheet.Buttons.Delete
If Cells(2, 3).Value Mod 2 = 0 Then
With buttonrangeresized
.Sort _
Key1:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn + 0), Order1:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption1:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, _
Key2:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 3), Order2:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption2:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, _
Key3:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 2), Order3:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption3:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers
Cells(2, 3) = Cells(2, 3) + 1 ' cell C2 stores the number of clicks done
End With
Else ' if button is clicked odd number of times order is Descending
With buttonrangeresized
.Sort Key1:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn + 0), Order1:=xlDescending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption1:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, _
Key2:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 3), Order2:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption2:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, _
Key3:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 2), Order3:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption3:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers
Cells(2, 3) = Cells(2, 3) + 1 ' cell C2 stores the number of clicks done
End With
End If
Call research '
Call header '
Exit Sub '
End Sub
Sub sortbyscholarorder()
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Call ResetFilters
Dim buttonrow As Long, buttonrange As Range, buttonrangeresized As Range
buttonrow = ActiveSheet.Buttons(Application.Caller).TopLeftCell.Row
buttoncolumn = ActiveSheet.Buttons(Application.Caller).TopLeftCell.Column
Set buttonrange = ActiveSheet.Range(Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn), Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn))
buttonrange.Select
k = 6
Selection.Resize(1, 12).Select
Selection.Offset(0, -1).Select
Selection.EntireColumn.Select
Set buttonrangeresized = Selection
ActiveSheet.Buttons.Delete
If Cells(5, 3).Value Mod 2 = 0 Then ' if button is clicked even number of times order is ascending
With buttonrangeresized
.Sort Key1:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 1), Order1:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption1:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, Key2:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn + 0), Order2:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption2:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, header:=xlYes
Cells(5, 3) = Cells(5, 3) + 1 ' number of clicks done
End With
Else ' if button is clicked odd number of times order is Descending
With buttonrangeresized
.Sort _
Key1:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 1), Order1:=xlDescending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption1:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, _
Key2:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn + 0), Order2:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption2:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, header:=xlYes '
Cells(5, 3) = Cells(5, 3) + 1 ' ' cell C1 stores the number of clicks done
End With
End If
Call research ' remake the researchgate buttons after sorting
Call header ' remake the header buttons
Exit Sub ' this is here to avoid getting the clicked button address when nothing is clicked
End Sub
Sub orderbynotes() 'action taken by the sort by your notes button
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Call ResetFilters
Dim buttonrow As Long, buttonrange As Range, buttonrangeresized As Range
buttonrow = ActiveSheet.Buttons(Application.Caller).TopLeftCell.Row
buttoncolumn = ActiveSheet.Buttons(Application.Caller).TopLeftCell.Column
Set buttonrange = ActiveSheet.Range(Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn), Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn))
buttonrange.Select
Selection.Resize(1, 12).Select
Selection.Offset(0, -2).Select
Selection.EntireColumn.Select
Set buttonrangeresized = Selection
ActiveSheet.Buttons.Delete
If Cells(6, 3).Value Mod 2 = 0 Then
With buttonrangeresized
.Sort _
Key1:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 0), Order1:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption1:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, _
Key2:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 1), Order2:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption2:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, _
Key3:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn + 2), Order3:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption3:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers
Cells(6, 3) = Cells(6, 3) + 1 ' number of clicks done
End With
Else ' if button is clicked odd number of times order is Descending
With buttonrangeresized
.Sort Key1:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 0), Order1:=xlDescending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption1:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, _
Key2:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn - 1), Order2:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption2:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers, _
Key3:=Cells(buttonrow, buttoncolumn + 2), Order3:=xlAscending, header:= _
xlYes, Orientation:=xlTopToBottom, DataOption3:= _
xlSortTextAsNumbers
Cells(6, 3) = Cells(6, 3) + 1 ' cell C2 stores the number of clicks done
End With
End If
Call research '
Call header ' necessary to remake the header buttons
Exit Sub ' this is here to avoid getting the clicked button address when nothing is clicked
End Sub
Sub research() '
With ActiveSheet
Range("D1").Resize(Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlRows, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Row, _
Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Column).Select
For Each xCell In Selection
If InStr(1, xCell.Text, "researchgate.net/profile") > 0 Then
Set btna = ActiveSheet.Buttons.Add(xCell.Left, xCell.Top, xCell.Width, xCell.Height)
With btna
    .OnAction = "researchgatebutton"
    .Caption = " OPEN RESEARCH GATE PDF LINK "
End With
End If
Next
End With
Range("A1").Select
End Sub
Sub researchgatebutton() '
Dim R As Range
Set R = ActiveSheet.Buttons(Application.Caller).TopLeftCell 'detect range (cell) of clicked button
R.Select
Set IE = CreateObject("Internetexplorer.Application")
IE.Visible = True
IE.navigate ActiveCell.Value
Exit Sub '
End Sub
Sub scihub() '
With ActiveSheet
Range("L1").Resize(Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlRows, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Row, _
Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Column).Select
For Each xCell In Selection
If InStr(1, xCell.Text, ".sci-hub.") > 0 Then
Set btna = ActiveSheet.Buttons.Add(xCell.Left, xCell.Top, xCell.Width, xCell.Height)
With btna
.OnAction = "scihubbutton"
.Caption = " OPEN sci-hub PDF LINK " & Left(xCell.Text, 80) & " [truncated?]"
End With
End If
Next
End With
Range("A1").Select
End Sub
Sub scihubbutton() '
Dim R As Range
Set R = ActiveSheet.Buttons(Application.Caller).TopLeftCell '
R.Select
Set IE = CreateObject("Internetexplorer.Application")
IE.Visible = True
IE.navigate ActiveCell.Value
Exit Sub '
End Sub
Sub modifylinks()
If Cells(999, 3) = "" Then
myproxy = InputBox("Modify original URLs adding a proxy string? (If no, click Cancel)", _
"Which proxy do you use?", "sci-hub.tw")
If StrPtr(myproxy) = False Then
MsgBox ("Alt F11 to show vba editor!")
Application.SendKeys "%{F11}"
Exit Sub
End If
If myproxy = "" Then
MsgBox ("Alt F11 to show vba editor!")
Application.SendKeys "%{F11}"
Exit Sub
Else
Cells(999, 3) = myproxy
Call proxy
End If
Else
Call removeproxy
Call modifylinks
End If
End Sub
Sub proxy()
With ActiveSheet
Range("L1").Resize(Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlRows, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Row, _
Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Column).Select
Dim lnk As Hyperlink, lnks As Hyperlinks
Set lnks = Selection.Hyperlinks
For i = 1 To lnks.Count
Set lnk = lnks(i)
If InStr(1, lnk.Range.Text, "researchgate") = 0 And _
InStr(1, lnk.Range.Text, "//") > 0 Then
strIn = lnk.Range.Text
Set objRegex3 = CreateObject("vbscript.regexp")
With objRegex3
.Global = False
.Pattern = "(https?:\/\/[A-Za-z0-9\.\-]+)(\/.*)"
If .test(strIn) Then
replacement = "$1." & myproxy & "$2"
lnk.Range.Value = .Replace(strIn, replacement)
ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Add anchor:=lnk.Range, Address:=lnk.Range.Value
End If
End With
End If
Next
End With
Call scihub
Range("D4").Select
End Sub
Sub removeproxy()
If Cells(999, 3) = "" Then
Exit Sub
Else
With ActiveSheet
Range("L1").Resize(Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlRows, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Row, _
Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Column).Select
Dim lnk As Hyperlink, lnks As Hyperlinks
Set lnks = Selection.Hyperlinks
For i = 1 To lnks.Count
Set lnk = lnks(i)
theproxy = Cells(999, 3).Value
If InStr(1, lnk.Range.Text, "researchgate") = 0 And _
InStr(1, lnk.Range.Text, theproxy) > 0 Then
correct = Replace(lnk.Range.Text, "." & theproxy, "", , 1)
lnk.Range.Value = correct
ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Add anchor:=lnk.Range, Address:=lnk.Range.Value
End If
Next
End With
End If
Cells(999, 3) = ""
Range("D4").Select
Call DelButtons
Call research
Call header
End Sub
Sub DelButtons()
Dim btn As Shape
For Each btn In ActiveSheet.Shapes
If btn.AutoShapeType = msoShapeStyleMixed Then btn.Delete
Next
End Sub
Sub cross()
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Dim IE As SHDocVw.InternetExplorer
Dim Doc As MSHTML.HTMLDocument
Dim Elements As MSHTML.IHTMLElementCollection
Dim TDelements As MSHTML.IHTMLElementCollection
Dim elements2 As MSHTML.IHTMLElementCollection
Dim htmlInput As MSHTML.HTMLInputElement
Dim Element As IHTMLElement
Dim TDelement As IHTMLElement
Dim objButton As MSHTML.IHTMLFormElement
Dim R As Integer
Dim c As Integer
Dim sentence As Variant
Dim sentence2 As Variant
Dim cSearch
Dim cSearch2
Dim snumber As Integer
snumber = 1
R = 0
Application.SendKeys "%{F11}"
For Each sentence In ActiveSheet.Range("I2", Range("I2").End(xlDown))
snumber = snumber + 1
R = R + 1
cSearch = sentence
      Debug.Print cSearch
cSearch2 = ActiveSheet.Range("J:J").Cells(0 + snumber)
Debug.Print cSearch2
cSearch3 = ActiveSheet.Range("H:H").Cells(0 + snumber) ' use for year
Debug.Print cSearch3
ActiveSheet.Range("N:N").Cells(0 + snumber).Value = "=BR" & snumber
ActiveSheet.Range("O:O").Cells(0 + snumber).Value = "=IF(ISERROR(REPLACE(RC[-1],1,FIND(""^^"",SUBSTITUTE(RC[-1],""/"",""^^"",3),1),""""))=TRUE,"""",REPLACE(RC[-1],1,FIND(""^^"",SUBSTITUTE(RC[-1],""/"",""^^"",3),1),""""))"
On Error Resume Next
Set IE = New SHDocVw.InternetExplorer
With IE
.Visible = False ' False
.navigate "http://www.crossref.org/guestquery"
Do Until Not .Busy And .readyState = 4
DoEvents
Loop
Set Elements = IE.Document.getElementsByTagName("Input")
For Each Element In Elements
If Element.Name = "auth" Then
Element.Value = cSearch
Exit For
End If
Next Element
Set elements2 = IE.Document.getElementsByTagName("Input")
For Each Element In Elements
If Element.Name = "atitle" Then
Element.Value = cSearch2
Exit For
End If
Next Element
'eliminate to not to use year
Set elements3 = IE.Document.getElementsByTagName("Input")
For Each Element In Elements
If Element.Name = "year" Then
Element.Value = cSearch3
Exit For
End If
Next Element
Do Until Not .Busy And .readyState = 4
DoEvents
Loop
Set Elements = IE.Document.getElementsByTagName("Input")
For Each Element In Elements
'     If Element.Name = "article_title_search" Then ' use if not using year
If Element.Name = "view_records" Then ' use when using year
Element.Click
Exit For
End If
Next Element
Do Until Not .Busy And .readyState = 4
DoEvents
Loop
Set TDelements = IE.Document.getElementsByTagName("td")
c = 1
For Each TDelement In TDelements
ActiveSheet.Range("O1").Offset(R, c).Value = TDelement.innerText
c = c + 1
Next
ActiveSheet.Range("N:N").Cells(0 + snumber) = ActiveSheet.Range("N:N").Cells(0 + snumber).Value
ActiveSheet.Range("O:O").Cells(0 + snumber) = ActiveSheet.Range("O:O").Cells(0 + snumber).Value
End With
Next sentence
Range("P1").Resize(Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlRows, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Row, _
Cells.Find(what:="*", SearchOrder:=xlByColumns, _
SearchDirection:=xlPrevious, LookIn:=xlValues).Column).Select '
With Selection
.Clear
End With
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
Call header
Call ddd
Exit Sub
Application.SendKeys "%{F11}"
End Sub
Function Contains(objCollection As Object, strName As String) As Boolean
Dim o As Object
On Error Resume Next
Set o = objCollection(strName)
Contains = (Err.Number = 0)
Err.Clear
End Function
Sub ddd()
Cells.Select
ActiveSheet.Range("O:O").Select
Selection.Copy
If Contains(Sheets, "dois") = False Then
Sheets.Add.Name = "dois"
End If
Sheets("dois").Select
Range("A1").Select
Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues, Operation:=xlNone, SkipBlanks _
:=False, Transpose:=False
Application.CutCopyMode = False
ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs Filename:= _
"dois.csv", FileFormat:=xlCSV, _
CreateBackup:=False             '        IMPORTANT
'                         GO TO BEGINNING,     CLICK ON CODE AND CLICK THE PLAY BUTTON
End Sub

I am trying this code but it is not working., It is opening internet explorer, then edge and later fails.  Only result I see in Excel is 10,20,30... and so on. Probably need modification. Microsoft is forcing Edge when Internet explorer opens.

Sorry, I don't really use windows commonly.

But this solution was posted by you and it is implemented in Microsoft excel.

Perhaps, some SEO tools can perform that task, but I am not too familiar with them. What I can suggest, though, is to use Web scraping for your purposes. However, note that going this route requires solid programming skills as well as decent amount time for testing and debugging.
Since you asked on Academia.SE, I assume that there is a relatively high probability that you are comfortable with computer programming. If you can work with Python, there is a scraping library BeautifulSoup. If you can work with R, there is a variety of approaches that can be used. For example, rvest package by Hadley Wickham. See this blog post for details and examples.

Yes, this is how it can be done.  But note that if you hit scholar too frequently with something like this it will block you temporarily (for an hour or so).

@DavidKetcheson: Good point, thank you for mentioning. The easiest way to tackle this issue is to introduce artificial delays in the code. Considering the small amount of elements to parse in results, it will not be critical time-wise, but will allow to honor Google Scholar traffic limits.

I think scraping violates the TOS: http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/3068/17331

@Luigi: Perhaps. But maybe not, considering the very recent precedent of Google winning against Oracle, based on playing the fair use card. It can be argued that scraping public information from Web pages is the case of the fair use.

@AleksandrBlekh Interesting. I could be wrong, but isn't fair use a way around IP/copyright restrictions? A website can put whatever it wants into its TOS and throttle/block users on that basis. Whether it would hold up in court is another matter but I'm not sure how many academics are willing to take Google to trial

@Luigi: Throttling is not a problem, at least, from technical perspective - as I said above, simple delay scheme could honor the site's limitations, while still being able to download the information (unless its volume is too big to practically use this approach). As for academics not willing to fight with Google in court, you're right. However, on the other hand, I'm not sure whether Google would be interested in suing academics for such a minor offense, which very well might be considered and ruled as a valid case of fair use. Google's lawyers likely have more important things to work on.


text:
Are picture-perfect acknowledgement sections the norm in Academia?
When I read other theses, I am often astonished by the sheer number of people whose help the writer is acknowledging in a multitude of ways. Here's an example to demonstrate what I am talking about, but I am sure you get the point: http://www.mit.edu/~alvarso/thesis-phd/Acknowledgements.pdf
In comparison, in the thesis that I am currently writing, I am getting close to the end, and the draft for my own acknowledgment section is currently

I would like to thank my advisor **********, as well as my close colleagues at the department of ********** at *****************.

I might spice it up with some adjectives, but that's pretty much it.
Are acknowledgement sections, like the one I linked to, the norm? If so, would a paper with a lackluster acknowledgement section be considered potentially subpar?

What you linked is definitely not the norm. But there is a whole spectrum starting with one-paragraph acknowledgments not much longer than yours, and ending at, well, probably what you linked. That said, if I were to mention "my close colleagues", I'd at least name them.

The acknowledgment section of my Ph.D. thesis is 5 lines long, and 2 of those lines are thanking the two typists who typed it up (this was long before the type-it-yourself TeX era) and the NSF.  I've never worried that this was too short.

I didn't look at your example, sorry, but I can say that when I'm looking at articles quickly to learn about something or find a useful reference, long flowery acknowledgments slow me down, and I end up wishing that section were at the end.  If your natural inclination is to be succinct in this section, go for it! // The department and the institution will already be indicated somewhere in the front matter, won't it?  So you could maybe pare it down a tiny bit more, if you wanted to!

I'm sorry to say it but IMO it's the acknowledgements section you linked to that is "lackluster" and "subpar". It is longer than some entire papers - unbelievable! Forget about adjectives and "spicing it up". Honestly no one cares, just make sure the contents of your paper are not lackluster and you'll be golden.

I don't think there is any misunderstanding here, but just to be sure: the norms for thesis acknowledgements and for paper (i.e. journal publication) acknowledgements are very different. The latter tend to be 4-5 lines at most, whereas the former are often (but not always) considerably longer.

I think it is impossible to give an answer without cultural context (country, but also institute). In my field (a quantitative social science, Netherlands), the linked example would definitly not be considered extreme. My own acknowledgement was one page, and probably the shortest of all colleagues I knew.

You seem be concerned that people may judge the quality of your thesis in part based on the length of the acknowledgments section.  I don't think that anyone will do that.
You may be missing a required acknowledgment of one or more grants from a funding agency.
A separate question is whether you have overlooked people who could to be acknowledged in your thesis, or whether it would be appropriate to include a more specific and detailed acknowledgment of the individuals you are acknowledging.  As the Ph.D. is the culmination not only of years of research but of years of your life, it's not unusual to think more broadly regarding acknowledgments than you would for a paper.  You may want to include, for instance:

Faculty outside of your committee or university who also mentored you or gave helpful comments and suggestions;
Anyone who developed code that you used in your thesis;
People who helped you do a better job with the writing itself, e.g. through teaching you better grammar, better Latex skills, etc.;
Family members (particularly a spouse) who have supported you during your doctoral work or inspired you to be a scholar;
Fellow students who have given you encouragement or proofread or otherwise commented on your work.

I suppose you can go too far in being inclusive, and perhaps the example you linked does, though I doubt anyone will get very upset about that either.
In my own acknowledgments I tried to be rather specific about what each of these individuals did, or how I benefitted from their help.  For instance, I acknowledged my advisor

...not only for providing continual support and guidance, but especially for allowing (and even enthusiastically encouraging) me to pursue research that I found fascinating but that is only indirectly related to his own research program.

Some of these kinds of acknowledgments would be considered out of place in a journal article, so the thesis gives you an opportunity that you may never get again (unless you publish a book) to express gratitude to these individuals in a somewhat official way.  You have nothing to lose by being more inclusive in expressing your gratitude, and you may make someone who reads it very happy by including them.

"You almost certainly are missing a required acknowledgment of one or more grants from a funding agency." I found that statement surprising, so I looked through about 30 online theses in my field of number theory collected here: http://www.numbertheory.org/ntw/N5.html.  Roughly 1/3 thanked funding agencies (a larger percentage than I would have predicted), the most common by far being EPSRC.  Also interesting: more than 10% didn't have any acknowledgments at all.  May I ask for the support of your probability measure?

@PeteL.Clark Interesting.  This is based on 2 assumptions: 1. Most Ph.D. theses result from work supported in some part by at least one grant.  2. Most funding agencies require that grantees acknowledge support in any publication.  Indeed, I don't personally know of any exceptions to either of those!  You must know something I don't, so please share.

My PhD thesis was not supported by any grant.  In my current department, the same holds for more than half of all PhD theses.  Moreover, just because a student got some support from an advisor's grant at some point does not mean they acknowledge this in their thesis: among other things, the connection between the funding and the student's work may be tenuous.

For instance, I supported a student of mine for one summer from a grant.  The support was not for him to work on any project of mine -- it was just support.  I think the honest truth is that nothing he did that summer made it into his thesis.  I also honestly don't think the funding agency cares either way about this.  By the way, I had zero conversations with my advisor about his grant support, though I know now that he must have had some the entire time.

@PeteL.Clark Interesting!  I think there is a lot to be said, but perhaps this should be posted as a separate question rather than an extended chain of comments.

@PeteL.Clark There is also the difference that acknowledging grants will often be done outside the section where one acknowledges others (for example there might be a footnote for each author with a statement of such grants), precisely because this acknowledgement is in some sense more "formal" and might be required to take a certain form.

@TobiasKildetoft I think you are discussing papers.  In a thesis there is only one author.

Right, but that would not necessarily exclude one from having grants acknowledged via a footnote (at least I have had such footnotes in solo papers). On the other hand, I am not sure I have seen it used in theses, so it might well be something restricted to papers.

I want to discuss one point in David Ketcheson's answer.

You seem be concerned that people may judge the quality of your thesis in part based on the length of the acknowledgments section. I don't think that anyone will do that.

There are many things to judge from the acknowledgement. It tells a lot about the relationship between the author and his/her PhD advisor, and the working environment in the group.
When I was applying for a PhD, I read a lot of PhD theses' acknowledgements to understand more about the PIs. Here are some sentences that I still remember, not exactly word by word though.

No acknowledgement at all? a big red flag here.
"I thank my advisor for introduce the problem A to me" -> What? that's it? I will not apply to be a student of this guy.
"I thank him for give me the freedom to explore blah blah" -> Oh, you are great, but I'm not independent enough to work with this guy.
"I thank him for countless discussions and encouragements" -> This guy is good.
"He supports me when PhD is not my first priority" -> This guy is awesome, who cares a lot about his students.
...

An acknowledgment is an individual, highly personal piece of writing that is probably not vetted by anyone else: it would be a mistake to read too much into the tea leaves here.  To take your examples: (i) I know at least one instance of a very satisfied student who had no acknowledgments whatsoever.  See also my comment to Dave Ketcheson's answer.  (ii) Possibly this is an expression of deep gratitude for receiving the perfect problem. (iii) Because an advisor gave one student what they needed makes them more likely to give you what you would need, not to treat you in exactly the same way....

(iv) The student was well satisfied with the advisor, anyway.  (It is actually possible to give a student too much help...but I agree it's a favorable sign.)  (v) To me that looks like a potential red flag about the student, but again it could just be strangely written, and one shouldn't read too much into it.

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text:
How should I approach a Tokyo University professor to join their lab?
What are the guidelines that I should follow when contacting a foreign University professor to ask for joining their lab?
I need to find a professor for my already accepted semester abroad as an exchange student. I will be doing my Final Year Project as an undergraduate student and I am having a hard time getting a response from the professors at the Tokyo University. I have contacted with the current student abroad and he told me that it also took him a while to find a professor.
So now I'm wondering about my methods. Is this letter okay?

Hello _____,
I'm an exchange student from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. I am contacting you to see if you might be interested in accepting me for doing my Final Year Project.
The project I would like to do is an artificial skin capable of registering different pressure points on a soft material layer. It would consist mainly on a foam that has resistivity variable with the pressure and an Arduino circuit to read and process these values. In this way we can read many points of pressure in a precise way.
The main challenge is joining several fields of Engineering, which is also one of the strongest motivations for me. I have broad experience in programming, I am confident of my capabilities in electronics and I have already verified that this material is the right one.
There are mainly two fields where this technology could be very useful:

Medicine: For the people who are missing a limb, this could bring back a part of the sensibility, even if it's in a different format.

Robotics: relying on precise pressure sensors could improve greatly the accuracy of many of their functions.

Would you accept me as a student to develop this project? Seeing your background I think that you might be interested.
Thank you so much for your time,
Francisco Presencia Fandos

The main feedback I've already gotten is that if I write the letter open to suggestions but not proposing a project it would be easier for the professors to accept me. Also, I'm thinking of writing my achievements so far, but I think they could look like bragging.
Is this letter okay? Is this the right method for finding a professor in an university abroad?

"I have already verified that this material is the right one." Then what do you want the professor to do? Put a stamp on the final research paper?

@cscaaahu no, I think I have the right foam material. I need help to combine it with the circuit, add protection (the material comes with some setbacks) and test it. I only wanted to emphasize that the project is almost ready to be started and that it is feasible.

For professors in Japan, taking on students is a tremendous responsibility and burden. Unlike in the United States or Europe, professors are responsible for even the extracurricular activities of students (i.e., getting arrested; showing up drunk and groping someone; having an apartment so messy that the landlord complains, etc.). They are also responsible for the student's career after they graduate.
So faculty are noticeably reticent to take anyone on that they do not know or that do not have anyone to vouch for them. It's in this context that letters of introduction from known faculty are extremely important.
This is very hard for outsiders to break into. Your best hope is that one of your professors knows somebody at U-Tokyo, or knows somebody who knows somebody at UTokyo. It's their letter of introduction that will open doors for you.
Cold-calling will not yield many good results.
Without a good letter of introduction, your next best strategy is to enroll in either a study-abroad program / exchange program with U-Tokyo that has open enrollment or to apply to one of their English-speaking graduate programs. Going through their international programs office tends to be much better as the staff are used to international norms for student applications. Unfortunately, most of these programs aren't in engineering, but at least it gets you a  foot in the door.

Edit: From the discussion, it became clear that the OP has already enrolled into an engineering program at U-Tokyo that caters to foreigners. In this case, it's the program's responsibility to find him his advisor, as it is clear from their FAQ:

"As an applicant for all courses, it is not necessary for you to
  contact a prospective supervisor in advance. Instead, after evaluating
  your application documents, we will allocate you to a field of
  study/faculty member which will be most appropriate for your research
  and research interests. "

I am currently enrolled in an exchange program with U-Tokyo, however we still have to find a professor since it's the final year project (1-to-1). I have a recommendation letter from the Rector at my university, I'll try to use that too to find a professor and find someone I know within the University. The first paragraphs put things in perspective and give me a better idea of how things work there. Do you think writing also my achievements so far would help?

The international students office should be able to make the introductions and liasing on your behalf. Also, weren't you assigned a program supervisor/advisor?

"Cold-calling will not yield many good results." Maybe I just got lucky, then, but I made three cold callw to professors in Japan (at Tokyo, Kyushu and Tohoku), and got a positive answer each time. (By "positive", I mean that the professor agreed to take me, at least in principle).

Could you provide a reference that the advisor is responsible if the student is getting arrested? This sounds very interesting!

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text:
Is it acceptable to use personal equipment for research?
I'm a new graduate student in a computational lab, and the workstations provided by the lab I'm in right now are...slightly subpar. Long story short, a lot of it is nearing a decade old, and there doesn't seem to be a push to replace it with new hardware anytime soon. Since our lab tends to work with pretty demanding programs, this creates a major issue.
Over at Workplace SE, the standard advice seems to be to point out the economics of the situation (devs = expensive, time lost = money lost), but I'm not convinced that the same reasoning holds in academia. In addition, from talking to labmates and various administrative staff, it seems that the lab won't have the funding to replace all (or even most) of the machines anytime soon.
Which brings me to a potential solution: I have a decently powerful computer sitting at home. Would it be a good idea for me to spend some of my own money to upgrade it and bring it in to the lab? My advisor is okay with this plan, but I don't know if there's other things I should worry about (e.g. unclear line between personal/lab equipment, or people coming to rely on the machine).
This is somewhat related to this question, but it seemed to be asking specifically about money and a grant application, while I'm more concerned about potential consequences of bringing personal property to the lab and using it for an extended period of time.

Do follow the standard advice. Even the most underpaid graduate students are far more expensive than a $1K-$2K computer. Also, ask them today how they will pay for your academic travel in a year or two if they cannot afford a computer now.

@BorisBukh: you're making a lot of assumptions about how their budgeting works and, if travel and workstations can be paid from the same budget, how close that budget is to running out. Maybe not paying for workstations is what allows them to pay for your travel. Maybe the relevant funding for the two different things isn't fungible. But of course you're right that it's worth asking, because if you know the reasons (however stupid they might be) then the situation may become less frustrating.

@BorisBukh In a First World country, sure. But in Second/Third World countries, where the monthly "salary" for a PhD student may be around $200, buying even a single $2000 (or even $1000) computer may be nearly impossible. Academic travelling? Ha!

@101010111100 but then you are less likely to own a powerful computer.

@Davidmh Not necessary true. My understanding is that in such countries, academia (along with many other professional areas) simply doesn't pay well. So you can make something like 2-5 times your PhD salary if you work outside of academia, say for one of those fancy technological companies which are popping everywhere, and you should be able to afford a reasonably priced computer, which in all likelihood is much better spec'd than anything your university can offer you.

@SteveJessop's example is particularly true in the UK.  For each PhD student (funded by EPSRC) There is an equipment budget, which would be used up on a fairly rubbish PC, and a travel budget.  For a good PC the supervisor would have to find top-up money

As an alternative to bringing in your own machine you could spin up a VM through a cloud service and SSH into it. The monthly cost might be more palatable to your adviser than buying a new machine plus it gives you a lot of flexibility and no worries over IP ownership

Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/62589/is-offering-to-use-personal-funds-for-research-a-good-idea

So you can make something like 2-5 times your PhD salary if you work outside of academia — This is also true in the US.

Don't bring your PC to the lab. Instead, consider doing your work from home. Also, some Universities have HPC systems available to researchers. You could try to get access to that if it exists and suits you.

Do you intend to plug your computer into the university's network?  If so, your network administrator may have an opinion about this.

Sadly its often such an administrative burden to get a computer quickly that using a BYO computer is often the most expedient solution to getting started on your actual work. But I suggest that approach as an interim solution while waiting for something to be supplied by work.

Another PhD student in my floor asked how to fix a slow system. Here is my supervisor's reply:

If you need to have a fast desktop, the best is to convince your boss to spend 3 days of your salary to buy a top of the line Linux machine (or a week of salary to buy a Mac).

Anything else is stupid on their part. Note that your cost is not only salary, but is also taxes, work insurance, university fees (where applicable), rent of the office...
Addition: Also, they got a grant to pay you, they need you to publish. The longer time you spend waiting for code to run, the less you will publish, and the less competitive they will be for future grants.
*Note: he was being moderately flippant, don't take the two days and top of the line too literally, but the point still stands.

The problem with bringing your own equipment is that:

It is yours, and  if you wanted to do something else with it, you wouldn't.
If it breaks, and a lab is a moderately risky environment, it is your loss and no one else will pay for it. Also, you may not  get support from the IT department to fix it.
It sets a precedent for other students to do the same. The stipend you get as a PhD student is quite meagre, and buying a computer out of it is a significant investment.
In some institutions research data  is considered confidential, and they forbid for it to live in non-institution owned devices.

This said, I often bring my laptop to work when I need the extra mobility, or my own workstation (a top of the line Linux machine) is overworked, but I don't rely on it.

The economics of this are very different for postgrads than for employees. Postgrad time does not have a high economic cost and sometimes does not have a high value placed upon it.

@gerrit it is not only salary, it is also taxes, work insurance, university fees (where applicable)... It does amount to a lot of money. It is in Sweden, by the way, I think you are familiar with it.

Even if the machine only costs 1000 USD (which is nice machine but certainly not top-of-the-line), to earn that much in three days you'd need to make 6.5k/month (assuming 19 work days a month), which seems unlikely unless you're a full professor. But of course even 1-2 weeks of salary wouldn't be too expensive for something we use all the time.

@Davidmh True.  I was thinking of the money I get in my pocket rather than the money my employer spends.  Deleting my comment (although top of the line to me means something else, as I running code on a 48-core Xeon machine with 2 TB RAM, admittedly shared with a lot of other people, but certainly more than 3 days my salary costs).

@jwg it was a PhD student, so still cheap labour.

@gerrit well, top of the line for a desktop computer.

@CodesInChaos You're missing a subtle difference (which is also explained in the answer): he's not asking to spend 3 days of his pay himself, he's asking his boss to spend the money it would cost to hire him for 3 days. This is a substantially larger amount since it includes the taxes, insurances, fees, office space rent, etc.

@Cronax on fairness to CodesInChaos, I edited the clarification after he had written the comment.

@Cronax I think the rule of thumb is 20% on top of gross wage for insurances&co in Germany, so it shouldn't make that big a difference. And 6 m^2 of office space can't be that expensive either.

@CodesInChaos I could be mistaken, but as far as I know, every euro a Dutch or Belgian employee receives in their bank account has cost his/her employer two euros. You'd be surprised how expensive office space can get as well, although that cost is divided across all of the employees when factoring into this particular calculation.

@Cronax I treated those 6.5k/month as "gross" wage from which the employee still has to pay income tax and part of the insurance. I'd expect a PhD to be below 4k/month.

Even if we generously assume that I cost $3 for ever $1 of stipend that I see, it'd still be a little more than 3 days of my cost...;) Your 3rd and 4th points are great though. I never even considered that.

@chipbuster even if we are talking about two weeks of salary, in three or four years pays off several times.

@Codes 20% is way too low. For 3000€ salary the employer already pays 3728€ which is 25% of the salary. But that ignores all the additional costs, particularly rental space and so on (vacation money!). When factoring all that in you'll be likely at 30-35% (the less you earn, the worse it is).

They really ought to provide adequate hardware, but realistically it may not happen.  I have no problem with using my own computers for academic purposes (and had no problem during my PhD).  However I wouldn't bring a personal desktop PC in to work.  Or at least I wouldn't until I knew the security and IT support staff well, and then I'd be reluctant.
It's yours and you should have the first and main say on what happens on it, while they will rightly try to run policies to protect their network (which may conflict with your gaming/bittorrent-for-perfectly-legal-purposes).  Software licences may also be an issue; they may imply or explicitly state that the software is to be installed on systems owned by the institution purchasing the license.
If you're confident to set it up securely (and there aren't any licensing issues), how about remoting in to it at home?  You can do your development work on the machines provided (whether that's code, simulations or whatever), and then run them on your own fast machine.
Background:
An issue that your supervisor may face is that bog-standard desktops are a reasonable price but as soon as you want anything better the (only approved IT) supplier who got the deal on the basis of volume sales will charge a small fortune, meaning that there just isn't enough money in the budget (ability, not willingness, to pay for it).  Combined with this, university IT departments can make it very difficult for staff/students to build a decent machine and get it on the network.  These restrictions can often be circumvented if you have good local IT support and are on friendly terms with them (which is essential if you're doing anything remotely computational).

+1 Exactly this. If you have a faster PC at home, run the experiments there. There is no need to bring it to work, because it will be a hassle for IT administrators (security) or in terms of logistics (the PC does nor belong to the university).

Not to mention who pays if it gets stolen/damaged on uni presmises

Regarding remote computing at home: 10 years old PC is still fast enough to perform daily computing. I use my laptop for CAD, typesetting etc. and it was "medium class" 10 years ago. And with high computing power the elevated power consumption comes - are you wiling to pay for your gear and it's consumption? A friend of mine rapidly downgraded his PC when he moved from dormitory to his own flat.

Power consumption is a good point, especially for the sort of thing I'm assuming (computationally heavy).  I'm ignoring the purchase price as the OP seems to be refrring to minor upgrades of existing kit.  I'm only on my third desktop in 20 years (and second laptop in ~12) so for daily use up to casual games I'm with you.

Power consumption is not necessarily that much of issue. Modern i7 processors (e.g. i7 4770) are very low on power consumption and support 32Gb - 128Gb of Ram. Most power consumption then depends on the graphics card.

"software is to be installed"?

@Crowley A 10 year old computer for typesetting and CAD? What? Replacing the desktop I had at university with my Ultrabook/Desktop at home I had a huge speedup compiling LaTeX (i.e. typeseting). I think you are severely underestimating the benefits of newer hardware. And as was pointed out correctly by Alexandros, power consumption of hardware has reduced dramatically. (My 2008 laptop has a 35W TDP processor, my more powerful Ultrabook - in terms of processing power - has a 15W TDP CPU.)

@DetlevCM I've observed same speedup when I changed the newer "office" machine with my older laptop. My point was, that when computing power really matters and differences are significant (waiting seconds or waiting minutes to get results) then power consumption is not negligible. Yes, newer processors have low TDP, but as mentioned above, GPU eats a lot. OP is in computational lab, whatever it means, therefore I suppose that they will push the gear to its limits.

@Crowley and even GPUs have become a lot more efficient. Nvidia GT 630 -> GTX 750 Ti, similar power draw,  maybe 15W more on the 750 but 5 times the processing power and that's just a low/midrange card. So even if they do GPU computing, newer models will offer more computational capacity at lower power draw. What we have mainly seen in recent years is a slowdown in the processing capability growth while at the same time power consumption is continuosuly decreased. Another plus of newer hardware is new instruction sets that can give speedup as well as faster RAM.

@ I agree that newer gear is faster and cheaper to run. Even though theeconomy increased significantly the power draw still cannot be neglected. I've just looked around and mobile processors have TDP from 2 W (Atom) to 60 W (i7 49x0 MX), desktop processors have TDP 35 W (i5 6x00 T) - 130 W (i7, Xeon). Doing computations 10 hours a day will cost you at least 0.3-1.3 kWh a day. You will save your time in the lab, but you will pay it by yourself. I do not say "Do not upgrade"; I say "Do not run your work at your home".

@Crowley Here 1kWh is ~10-15p.  Lets round up and say it costs £1/week or twice that if it's running 24/7.  You can almost certainly save that elsewhere (if you're not working through the night because you model took a week to give nonsense data, you need less coffee).  Plenty of people leave their machines fully on anyway, in which case you'd be comparing working vs. idle, reducing the cost some more.

@ChrisH Fair enough. I don't know the exact prices, but if one sacrifise one beer in the pub he can pay himself a two weeks of computing!

At least here in Germany there is this thing that (at least in public institutions) electrically powered machines (even phone chargers) need to be checked for safety by a specified person and then labelled that they are safe to use. This is because of liability. What happens when your PC causes a fire that burns down the building (obviously the worst case)? If the lab didn't officially approve, you might be in trouble.
In case this is handled differently in your workplace and you get the OK from your boss, you'll be fine I think. But as the first commenter said, you should not be forced to bring your own hardware. Keep bringing up the topic. Tell them how much time you're wasting with old hardware and maybe they'll budge.

That practice is not very widespread. I have seen it in the UK, but not in Spain nor in Sweden. Usually, the check is just looking at it, seeing that it doesn't have visible damage, and put a sticker on it.

Use of personal laptops is common here in the UK (e.g. the uni provides/you opted for a desktop, but you want to take your presentation on the road).  The charger can be PAT tested when you first bring it in (I keep a spare in work).  This aspect is (or should be) a non-issue)

It should be a non-issue, I agree. Yet at the same time I am forbidden to buy a monitor from my private money and use it at my desk for the reason I described above.

Note that at least in Germany, these rules do not prevent anyone from plugging in all kinds of "unauthorized" devices nonetheless (and even if employees might go through the hassle of officially getting an authorization, all the students who bring their laptops to uni certainly do not). Might not be happening so much with stationary devices (such as desktop computers), though, which cannot be "hidden" as easily in the rare case of someone actually checking.

Yeah, it's slightly odd, you can plug in your own phone charger but you can't plug in your own monitor. OK, the phone charger draws less current and is fused lower. But if you're allowed to just assume that the device draws the current it's supposed to and is fused correctly then there's no point certifying equipment, you've already assumed it's OK. I once had my own device certified for electrical safety at work by accident: I unthinkingly left in on my desk the night they were doing it, next morning it had a label on. No fuss, no problem ;-)

@SteveJessop: The way it's described in this answer, you cannot officially plug in your own phone charger. (Although, as I said, such rules are commonly disobeyed in my experience.)

@O.R.Mapper: that's what I meant, I agree with you and was talking about places where it's done nonetheless. Doing it undermines the electrical testing, so there's no safety reason to be officious about monitors once you turn a blind eye to phone chargers. Well, there's a safety-from-getting-caught reason as you say, but not a good safety-from-fire reason. I wasn't clear that where I said "can" and "allowed", I meant in practice by your nearby colleagues, rather than by the rules.

If you take a monitor (or a coffee maker) to the office it will have the sticker that shows that it has been tested a year from now.

Do you not have national organizations [like in North America we have UL and CSA] to do this kind of certification?

@Random832 part of the issue is preventing problems arising from the users, and not necessarily from the equipment. Imagine people using an extension cord and plugging in 6 or 7 heavy-current-draw equipment into one outlet, or people using old/second hand equipment with faulty electrical wiring due to old age or normal wear-and-tear. // Even in the United States frequently when outfitting a lab you will need to double check with facilities to make sure the equipment you intend to install in the lab will not overtax the electrical supply.

@WillieWong A sticker on each piece of equipment doesn't seem like an attempt to address that either though.

@Random832: I quote from Davidmh's comment "... seeing that it doesn't have visible damange ...". Also, extension cords are equipment too.

@Random832 devices have to be CE marked, which is not quite the same but a similar idea.  This is a type test though, and isn't performed on every unit, so the manufacturer is essentially slef-certifying.  I believe this is the same in the US given the cost of testing a single item.  Hardware gets damaged, or may even be built wrong, and detection of dangerous states resulting from this is up to the employer/premises owner.  That said, the only hardware I've come across causing real problems had current tests - and caught fire due to poor design which couldn't be detected.electrically

They recently checked the electrical devices im my office. I now have a checked sticker on my old power supply whose wiring I re-soldered myself years ago (to match another laptop, and to eliminate a galvanic-coupling problem). Much to my surprise it turns out I did that in a VDE-conformant manner...

@Davidmh There is actually a full recommended procedure for PAT testing in the UK, though it's not compulsory. Most academic institutions and a majority of commercial enterprises with an in house IT department use it. It involves checking for damage, yes, but also the condition of the wiring and its resistivity (a change since the last test can indicate an electrical issue that has dangerous potential).

This is possibly more of a comment, but a bit of personal experience/observations from Europe:
What is the ideal situation: You are provided with the equipment you need.
What is the reality? You generally find you lack equipment - be it a good PC or a second monitor, etc.
When I did my PhD, I got an old computer - a Dell desktop that at the time was about 4 years old and technically weaker than my old laptop at the time... well, I used it - got a desktop at home a year later which was a lot more powerful (which I specced considering my PhD work) and then another 1.3 years later got so fed up with the old Dell that I replaced the entire thing with my own Ultrabook (which despite weighing 1.4kg is or was more powerful).
Incidentally, I did bring up the idea of buying my own computer (small desktop) when they PAT tested the Dell (weird British habit these "PAT tests"...) and the suggestion was that it would not be allowed.  Hence my solution was to get the Ultrabook instead (which cost 3 times as much but which I still have - and from which I write this post actually)
The chance that I would have gotten a new PC towards the end of my PhD was also pretty much zero - why should they pay for it? (EPSRC only funded my tuition fee and maintenance... - heck, I had to be happy that the university paid for some experimental work...)
I could also still use the Linux boxes and the Cluster just fine vie the University wifi using SSH so it wasn't a problem in any way.
Incidentally, other students were better off - the "CFD lot" got new computers at the start and one guy funded by industry even got a laptop to use (not sure if he got to keep it, it was an option, not sure what the end result was though).
Now as PostDoc at a different institution I would love a second monitor - and instead have a Dell workstation that is weirdly specced...
It has an E5 Xenon in there which I don't need and an NVidia Quadro (not a low one) but I only get a single monitor... I'm not the only one who'd like another monitor but effectively everybody in the institute has to make do with a single monitor. Why? I don't know. IT decided what we get to use.
A PhD student in the UK started and the mood was "he has a powerful laptop he does not need a PC". (I hope they did get him one eventually...)
Incidentally, the same VM setup that took 1 hour to run on my desktop took 2 hours on his laptop - despite it having about 70% of the processing power of my desktop in benchmarks...
So what is the reality? Invariably in academic research you generally end up using your own equipment - because the equipment supplied is lacking in some respect or you want to work at home, etc. etc.
However, there are a some points to consider:

If you do commercially or otherwise sensitive work for industry, using your own equipment may be very much frowned upon.
Different institutions have different policies - some object to you taking your work home. Obviously, if you start writing a literature review at home there is little they can do, however you would be better off following company policy and leaving work in the office. (Unless they furnish you with a work laptop that you can take home.)

Then there is the topic of licenses:

If you can use free software or can afford the licenses for the software you use, great, no problem.
However I have noticed that it appears not to be unusual for some students to obtain software from illicit sources, this may have consequences if any questions are asked, for both the student and potentially the university (if they condoned such practices).

Is there really no source of spare monitors in the department?  I've got a 1920x1080 that came with my PC (advantages of being in a well-funded, growing group) and a 1280x1024 with almost exactly the same vertical height.  Even some of our PhD students have similar setups.  It's a matter of knowing who to ask nicely.  As for mystery software sources - if you're into that, it's a good reason to run personal hardware.

No, it's institute policy. Some people found a low res second monitor but it isn't officially approved just accepted... Also it is only a 1 year PostDoc, so I don't have any leverage, if it were a permanent position I would insist including offering to buy the thing myself and leave it to the institute when I leave if it must be. But not for another 6 months. Back during my PhD I managed to get a second monitor before moving to my Ultrabook. When I was using a desktop at home I also had a dual monitor setup for about 8 months (and then had to leave that as I couldn't move with my desktop...)

It looks the policies are often made by people with absolutely no idea of what they are deciding about and no will to get even slight insight.

I personally use my own laptop in lab, though mostly because it's convenient to have my data on hand whether I'm at work, at home or wherever, not because they couldn't afford a computer for me. As I understand it, there is no need for it to pass any sort of certification or be put on the institute's balance (at least here in Russia). Although it may be important to note that neither me nor my computer get in the same room with actual laboratory work too often.
The only possible issue is that some inspection may get wondering how exactly this particular bioinformatician is supposed to work without any device to his name. It sounds contrived, but I've heard that FASO inspectors sometimes are, let's say, overly meticulous. And, if you are planning to ever bring your machine out, better avoid getting it anywhere near the institute's bureaucracy. If it has a label on it, you are always at risk of being accused of theft and having to spend lots of time proving that you aren't a camel.

So much depends on the specifics of your situation. I used my personal laptop throughout grad school [in the US] and it was totally fine; in fact, most of my department did the same. I was the only one who used the machine, but no one cared that it wasn't university property.
In contrast, one of my jobs since graduation had very strict departmental guidelines on what computers could be used when and where. We had a few very old project laptops that were struggling to meet our data collection demands. Our IT department came back with a quote for a laptop that was insanely overpowered for our current and any future needs and about twice what we would pay for a comparable laptop on the open market. When we went ahead and bought one on our own anyway, it turned into a Big Incident that (really unnecessarily, IMO) went all the way up to the dean, because our IT department had a fit. For the same reason, I wasn't allowed to donate an old unused machine of mine for project use.
TL;DR: You already know your adviser is okay with it. Check that your department (admin, or IT person/department if you have one) doesn't have an issue with it either. If it's all good, agree on ground rules with your adviser before actually going ahead with it - who can use it, what happens if someone other than you breaks it, what happens when you graduate, etc.

I'm going to try to not answer this whole question,
"Would it be a good idea for me to spend some of my own money to upgrade it and bring it in to the lab?"
Rather I'll answer this part of the question,
"Would it be a good idea for me to spend some of my own money to upgrade it and bring it in to the lab?"
Since you already have approval to bring in your own, you likely can get approval for something which might be lower cost or be faster - public cloud computing.
If you are looking for long-term, then buying is cheaper, but for short-term, using cloud is great.  AWS has a lot of compute and even GPGPU compute. They are a bit pricey, but there are plenty of other cloud providers out there.  At a university I worked at last year, they often would use cloud computing for projects, especially those lasting less than a year.
In addition, you will eliminate any possible issues of:
- others using it, or turning it off while running
- power consumption
- risk of fire or other hazard
- storage
- location
- damage by others
- and more.

+1 for the optimism of expecting OP might get budget approval for that :-)

I discuss about this problem for years now in my university (did my B.Sc. and M.Sc. here and now starting my PhD).
We also got a room with computers for students where lab sessions are held and some do their homework. However, several problems arise:

Software is hardly up to date, often more than one year behind the current stable release
Hardware was bought from the cheapest deal the university could get (of course, no money in academia) - resulting in a crappy keyboard, mouse and display and (most important!) most of the time equipped with a HDD instead of a SSD (should be getting the defa
Users do not have the rights to install or even update any software. Often important software is missing to do proper data analysis (e.g. notepad++ instead of the default windows editor)
If you come to the lab, somebody else might sit on your PC and you might have to switch to another PC at which you may not have set all your personal settings yet
Students pretend that they were not able to do certain analyses because the software was not installed/too old/crashing on one particular PC in the lab. Seriously?

I started early buying myself a good working machine which serves as my personal laptop at home and at work. I have everything installed I need and do not have to worry about others taking it. I can take an external display and work efficiently. Downside: Carrying the laptop with me every day or leave it in the lab (but miss it at home then).
I understand the point that universities have to offer capacities of what they want to teach. However, a lot of money is invested which could be used more efficiently:

Get the students a proper chair
Get the students a proper monitor, mouse and keyboard
Buy only 1/5 as many pcs as monitors and other stuff (for those who really have no PC) and let them bring their own laptop
Teach them using open-source software and avoid paying for licenses!

Nearly everybody nowaydays has their own laptop (even the most social sciene students) which is able to do the same as the (old) desktops PCs standing around in university labs.
However, as mentioned above, certain problems arise regarding softwares for which the university has only a certain number of licenses for specific PCs, sharing data in internal networks etc. (but this may all go beyond the question here).
In short: Get yourself your personal work setup and work efficiently! Do not wait for others to do something good to you. Your result counts in the end and nobody asks why you took so long or were not able to get XY running.

I am also a grad student in a computational group and would agree with many of the answers above saying that you should be hesitant to buy/bring your own computer if that is going to be the only machine doing all of the calculations.  In that case your PI should supply you with appropriate tools to do your research.
However, if (as is true of my group) you are using your computer as a portal to set up calculations to be run on a super computer cluster, the age and speed of the desktops in your lab is not going to affect your research in any meaningful way.  In that case, bringing in a laptop to access articles and for music (my own guilty pleasure denied to those poor saps in wet labs) would be appropriate to supplement the slower desktop machines that you use to set up your calculations.

Ahh, I had left this detail out of the question for fear of complicating it, but about half our work is done on supercomputers as well. The issue is that the other half isn't related to the grants we have on the supercomputers, so we're stuck running it on our antiquated hardware. That probably reduces the incentive to upgrade (since we're not bottlenecked by our lab hardware for many projects)

@chipbuster How is your other work paid? It is contracted research?

Unfortunately, I'm not 100% sure on what contracted research means :( Most often, an external organization (hospital, private company) will approach us with an interesting problem and we end up forming a collaboration. This sometimes comes with money from that organization (is that what contracted research means?)


text:
Is Lecture Notes by Springer a journal?
Sorry for asking maybe a too-specific question. I've searched the internet and in this site but I still want a specific answer.
Is the Lecture Notes in (enter the name of field here) by Springer a journal?
Some universities require the PhD students to publish in journals in order to graduate, so I want to know. I am in Computer Science field.

The real question here seems to be, "Will my university count a paper in a Springer Lecture Notes series towards my graduation requirements?" We have no idea, because we don't even know what university you're at. You should check your university's policy and ask your advisor.

Yes only they know the answer..thank you for making me realize my own question and for the advice.

If LNCS is your only publication, I doubt you've done enough for a PhD...

The point is probably that they require you to publish with in-depth peer review, which conference (in CS) rarely (never?) provide. Some issues of LNCS may have that, other don't (if they are just publications of conference papers without additional review); check with your advisor.

Thanks Jeff for the grim reminder, and thanks Raphael always for your advice. I'll check with my advisor.

I think the technical answer is no.  Rather it is a series of research monographs.
Clearly there is a continuum here, and actually the SLN[X] series seems to have become more journal-like since the last time I checked.  (The SLNM webpage lists an inmpact factor, for instance.)  I think you can do no better than to consult the series homepages:
Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics.
Springer Lecture Notes in Physics.
In CS the series seems to be organized into many subseries, however each volume gets a "global number".
However in all three cases you can check the language used and see that they talk about "monographs", "titles" and "texts", never "journals".  If my memory is accurate, librarians view them this way as well: sometimes journals can be checked out for a much shorter time than books, and in my experience the SLNM have always been treated like books.
For the math series, from the linked page you can click to get a four page pdf file detailing the editorial policy for the productions of the LNM monographs. The following passage seems rather enlightening:

Monograph manuscripts should be reasonably self-contained and rounded off. Thus they
  may, and often will, present not only results of the author but also related work by other
  people. They may be based on specialised lecture courses. Furthermore, the manuscripts
  should provide sufficient motivation, examples and applications. This clearly
  distinguishes Lecture Notes from journal articles or technical reports which normally are
  very concise. Articles intended for a journal but too long to be accepted by most journals,
  usually do not have this "lecture notes" character. For similar reasons it is unusual for
  doctoral theses to be accepted for the Lecture Notes series, though habilitation theses may
  be appropriate.

I could not find the analogous file for either the SLNCS or SLNP.
In terms of the specific question:

Some universities require the PhD students to publish in journals in order to graduate, so I want to know. I am in Computer Science field.

This is a question about academic culture, both general CS culture and the culture of your specific department and university.  You certainly need to ask people in your own local culture.  As you can see above, in mathematics graduate students rarely publish in SLNM: PhD theses are generally not appropriate, and it is hard to see what other book-length partially expository high level research document it would be worth the time of a graduate student to write and publish.  But it looks like CS does things a bit differently...

I see.. It's better safe than sorry, so better clarify with the university and aim for a proper journal. Thank you Pete and schester.

"In CS there are many subseries and they don't seem to be numbered." - LNCS is numbered, if you are referring to volume numbers there. I have stumbled upon a few subseries, but those subseries seemed to be more like selected subsets of LNCS (and thus had just their global LNCS number) rather than individual series disjoint from LNCS with a separate numbering scheme (LNAI comes to mind).

@O.R. Mapper: I checked again and you're right.  Thanks very much.

There are (still) some proceedings (especially of seminars) that are published as LN in Mathematics; a famous old example would be part of SGA, IIRC, but it still happens. It seems quite possible  that a graduate  student  has such a paper.

@quid: Yes, that's true.  I thought of that when writing my answer but chose not to include it.  It seems like a bit of an edge case...

The Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series (and its related sub-series) are rather odd publications.  The DBLP bibliography server marks them as a journal in one way, but categorizes them as a series in another way, and they are structured and reviewed more like conference proceedings or collections of book chapters.
I personally would not think of them as being the equivalent of a journal publication.  Whether they count as a journal publication for a particular organization's set of regulations, however, is something that only that organization can determine.

So I'll have to ask the university admin.. Thank you very much for your answer.

They really should not be considered journals. Many papers published there are later polished and journal versions are published elsewhere. Some even describe themselves as extended abstracts. Many of these proceedings impose page restrictions that essentially force this to happen: Many proofs have to be left out, for the "archival" version.

Actually, dblp does not exactly classify LNCS as journal. In fact, if you query the venue search API for "lncs" (eg: http://dblp.dagstuhl.de/search/venue/api?q=lncs) you will find it explicitly tagged as "Series". However, the LNCS dblp pages are placed in the "db/journals/..." URL space, which is due to historical reasons and one of the many inconsistencies found in dblp's URL and key structure (as opposed to, say, the detailed and error-corrected data in the XML files). Such inconsistencies essentially never leave the system since dblp has not revoked any URLs or dblp keys in over 20 years.

@MRA That's really useful and interesting information; I will update my answer accordingly.

Status of LNCS is rather strange, but it is surely not a journal. Each book is a proceeding (I'm not aware of any exceptions to this rule), and altogether it's simply a series. I'll try to explain why:

Note that while it has an ISSN, each of its volumes gets an ISBN. This makes it a "serial" publication, but each of the books is ... well, a "book". (Journal issues do not get ISBN.)
Springer itself lists most (if not all) of the books as proceedings, including the dates of the conference etc. The conference dates are usually not listed for special issues for instance, it's most often only mentioned in the preamble. (Jounal issues don't get "names".)
You get invited talks listed there which are not peer-reviewed. (In journals, only announcements are -- in general -- not peer-reviewed.)
It has no periodicity. (Journals have to be periodical; this periodicity can change over time, and supplements can appear that break the periodicity, but if LNCS were a journal, it would be a journal with no regular issues published periodically.)
It does not have, and cannot have by current standards, impact factor assigned. (Journals can have IF, obviously.)

To conclude: Each book is a proceeding, and the papers are "inproceedings" by BibTeX standard. Note that according to many bibliography styles, you should list the name of the proceeding together with its editors, and the volume number in the series. I speak about LNCS, but it's the same for all Springers series, and not only them, the same applies for instance to EPTCS as well.

Specifically for Lecture Notes in Computer Science: No. As can be found from http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-1068921-0

Not being a journal, but a book series publishing primarily proceedings, LNCS is not included in ISI's Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E) and hence does not have an impact factor. However, references to ISI-listed journals that are cited in LNCS papers do contribute to the respective journal’s impact factor.

As of 2018, it is included in ISI Conference Proceedings Citation Index. I'm not sure whether the conference papers published in LNCS before 2018 will be included as well.
https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/information-on-abstracting-and-indexing/799288

Volumes published as part of the LNCS, LNAI, LNBI, CCIS, IFIP AICT, LNICST or LNBIP series are made available to the following indexing services:
ISI Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science (CPCI-S), included in ISI Web of Science
...

authors: Артем Власов


text:
How to cite papers where the names are sorted?
I have a paper with autors A, B, C and D. Their names appear sorted by last name, so the order of the authors does not really say anything about their role in the paper.
When I cite this with the style that I currently use, I obtain “A et al, 2014”. This is logically, but B was the speaker and D is the professor of the workgroup.
Should I now cite this as “A et al”, or change the order of the names and make it “D et al” or “B et al”? The second version only works since I know the roles in the workgroup. With other papers, I would not know how to do this.
I could also just cite it as “[1]” and not worry about that at all …
What would be a good way to deal with this in general?

Follow whatever the citation style says (you are using one citation style, don't you?) . Nothing more nothing less.

I do not use a particular citation style at the moment. It looks like that most papers of the field just use “[1]” style references within the text. That is probably the thing to do, then.

@queueoverflow No matter what most people in your field do, if you've seen the [ABC07] style of citations, go for it. As a reader, I can tell you that it saves lots of going back and forth, since most of the readers of your paper are familiar with the most common citations and know which paper is [ABC07].

@yo' I do like that style as well, since I sometimes will know what paper is referenced without looking up the number.

If there are only four authors, it is not so hard to mention them all in the text of the article: "A, B, C, and D [3] show that ..."

@queueoverflow No matter what most people in your field do, if you've seen the [ABC07] style of citations, avoid it like the plague.  As a reader, I can tell you that it makes reading the paper horrible, especially since everyone uses slightly different styles and there are lots of overlapping papers with the same initials.  Just listing the authors by name in the text saves flipping back and forth.

@JeffE But when reading a paper, it is much easier to remember that [ABC07] refers to the paper by those authors than the fact that [3] does, even if you have previously looked up which paper it is. And mentioning the names of the authors every single time the paper is cited could make for an unnecessarily long paper.

@TobiasKildetoft But it's even easier to remember that "Arora, Borak, and Chazelle" refers to a result by those three authors.  So what if it uses more text?  Ink is cheap!

@JeffE Right, but what when I am citing specific results of several papers by those authors? I guess it is still possible to use full names, but at least in those contexts I am used to, it would not be nearly as readable.

Elaborating slightly on David Richerby's answer: cite the paper with the authors in the same order that they appear in the original.  Never reorder them for any reason.
The simplest reason for this is that people will expect that your citation matches the original author ordering.  If the original paper has authors in the order A,B,C,D, and you cite it with authors B,D,C,A, a reader is going to think you are talking about a different paper by the same people, in which B was listed as the first author.  They will probably figure it out eventually, but confusion will occur in the meantime.
For a deeper reason, there are two possible reasons why the authors wrote their names in the order A,B,C,D:

They made a decision that A should be considered the "first author", perhaps because A had the original idea or did most of the work.
They made a decision to list their names alphabetically, so that nobody would be "first author".  This implies that they believe that all of them contributed (approximately) equally to the paper.

In either case, you should respect their decision.  If you change the author ordering, it makes it seem like you are second-guessing their decision, as if you know better than the authors who did what on the paper.  This will come across as arrogant and disrespectful.
You can't assume that the person who presented a paper at a conference is the one who did the most work on it.  Maybe A did the most work but couldn't attend the conference for some reason.  Maybe they all did the same amount of work, but B really wanted to give the talk and so they agreed to let him.
You also shouldn't assume that the professor of a workgroup is the one who deserves the most credit for a paper.  In many cases, the most senior person on a paper is the one who is  least involved in its details (because they are dividing their time between many different projects).
So if the paper lists the authors as A,B,C,D, cite it as ABCD.  Some people think the use of et al is problematic, especially for alphabetically ordered papers, but if you must use it, cite as "A et al."

"et al" is largely unavoidable with multi-authored papers. I'd much rather people referred to my seven-author paper as "Chen et al" than just "[4]", even though I'm seventh alphabetically. That way, at least one of us gets credit as a human being rather than a paper.

If the authors are listed as Adams, Brown, Clinton, Dylan, you cannot cite it as Brown et al. The standard thing is to simply cite Adams et al.
If you are one of the authors and you cite it.
Let's say that you are Brown and you now have an article with Eldridge. Then you can write the following:

... as was shown by the first author in collaboration with Adams et al. [ABCD14].

This way you cite the paper properly and at the same time, you make it clear that you are one of its authors.

Are you saying all the author names are spelt out in-line, rather than in the bibliography?

@gerrit Well, they'll be in the bibliography, but you mention them inline as well.

@gerrit If you're talking about the [ABCD14], that's the initials of A, B, C, and D (it's clearer when their names have more than one letter; if the authors were Adams, Bengston, Charles, and Donn, you'd say "with Adams et al. [ABCD14]" instead of "[Adams-Bengston-Charles-Donn 14]")

@cpast Hm, then I hope that your field does not frequently have papers with more than a handful of authors.

@gerrit Don't worry, we've invented [ABC+14] as well ;)

I've never seen a citation style that allows reordering the authors. If you're mentioning them by name, either list them all or write "First et al.", regardless of whether First is first author because of some estimation of merit or because of an accident of birth.

Alphabetical ordering of authors is the prevalent style in mathematics (there may be other fields where this is used, e.g. theoretical CS, but I'm not aware of any others).
In mathematics it is considered good style to cite the author list in full, i.e. A,B,C,D instead of A et al. The reason is that all authors are considered to have contributed (approximately) equally to the paper, so they deserver equal credit and exposure. Citing as A et al. would underexpose people with lastnames further down the alphabet. Also note that in mathematics, papers rarely have more than 3-4 authors, so this is not too unreasonable to do.