Look up scholarly works by DOI or query via the Crossref REST API using the polite pool
domain: api.crossref.org · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Construct a request to /works (for search/filter queries) or /works/<doi> (for a direct DOI lookup)
Add a mailto=<your-email> query parameter, or set a User-Agent header containing 'mailto:<your-email>', to be routed into the polite pool
For search, use the query parameter (or query.<field> variants) and filter parameters to narrow results
Parse the JSON response's message object for title, author, container-title, issued date, and DOI
Cache responses locally and avoid re-fetching identical queries repeatedly
Monitor response times/HTTP status and back off if Crossref signals degraded service
Known gotchas
Omitting the mailto parameter/User-Agent contact info routes requests to the unthrottled public pool, which has lower priority and can be slower or rate-limited more aggressively
Crossref's rate limits are not fixed/published constants and can change dynamically under load — read X-Rate-Limit response headers rather than hardcoding a number
Some metadata fields (e.g. abstract, full-text links) are only present for a subset of records depending on what the publisher deposited
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