Thank you so much for responding.

The researchers in the paper identified it as "Perl String". It does indeed not look like the Perl tutorials I have read/watched.

When I fill in the keywords I do get the output I need, but it is specified as #articles per Company per year. What I need is #articles per Company per CEO for 10 years.

Could the authors of the paper maybe mean that it is possible to organize the outputdata with Perl.

This is how the authors describe the Perl program:

"To measure negative publicity about CEO compensation, we iteratively develop a Perl program to process the text of each article about CEO compensation to assess whether the article has a negative tone. The input into the Perl program consists of a set of negative tone keywords and phrases. This set of keywords and phrases was developed from manually reading approximately 200 articles about CEO compensation, where the articles included both randomly selected firms and firms widely known to have received negative publicity"