📊 CSV Citation Counter

This Python script processes one or more CSV files to summarize publication and citation data by a chosen column — such as journal names, author names, or institutions.

It supports:

• ✅ Counting how many times each entry appears (e.g., number of articles per journal)
• ✅ Summing citations per entry using a "Cited by" column
• ✅ Calculating average and max citations per entry
• ✅ Sorting results by:
  • Number of articles [articles]
  • Total citations [total]
  • Average citations per article [avg]
• ✅ Handling multi-entry fields (e.g., multiple authors separated by ; )
• ✅ Writing clean summaries to a human-readable summary.txt

📦 Requirements

No external libraries required — works with standard Python 3.

🚀 How to Run the Script

You can run the script in two ways:

✅ Option 1: Command Line Arguments

python script.py \
  --files data/file1.csv data/file2.csv \
  --column "Authors" \
  --split "; " \
  --sortby avg

✅ Option 2: Interactive Mode

You'll be prompted to:

Enter file paths or folders:

Input one path per line (CSV file or folder)

Hit Enter on an empty line when you're done

All .csv files in a folder will be included

Column name to analyze (e.g., Journal, Authors)

Delimiter (optional) if each csv entry has multiple elements (such as authors):

Leave blank for single-entry fields

Make sure to add a space (like "; ") if necessary.

Sort method (optional):

articles → by number of articles (default)

total → by total citations

avg → by average citations per article

Output

The summary is recorded to a summary.txt in the same directory where this script was run. Blank lines separated groups with differnet values for the sort attribute.