Hello @theonlydvr . Thanks for your message, and welcome to the community forum!
No, our REST API does not support boolean operators, so you’re right you are performing an OR search here. But, I think there are ways to get the information you seek.
Narrow queries with few values in your query are going to return imprecise results. We know that. We have over 163 million DOIs in our corpus, so sending us more information in the query is better. I found a real-life example here that we can use to help clarify this:
Let’s say we’re looking for works written by author Steven Hoang. Even if we allowed for boolean operators, Steven AND Hoang is going to give us a lot of noise. So, what else do we know about the author. Let’s say that we know this author has long been affiliated with the John Peter Smith Health Network in Fort Worth, Texas, USA. Well, let’s just expand our search so we can get the most relevant results. Thus, we’d query for:
https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?query.affiliation=Steven+Hoang+John+Peter+Smith+Health&select=DOI,title,type,published,author,score&rows=750
In this example query, the API is providing results for any content registered with us with any of these words in the author name or affiliation elements of the record registered with us: Steve, Hoang, John, Peter, Smith OR health. A ton of fairly common names/terms, right?
As you can see, because we are including six search terms, we’re going to get many results - over 2 million. Yikes! But, the results are ordered by relevance score, so works (DOIs) with all six words in its affiliation metadata will be ranked higher than works with only one of the search terms in its metadata. I’ve requested the top 750 results and also limited the metadata returned in the results to the relevant works’ DOI, title, work type (e.g., journal article), publication date, author name, and relevance score.
As you can see from the limited metadata that I have searched on, the first two results, look much more relevant to your query than the 750th result:
The second result includes an author named Steven Hoang and that DOIs relevance score is 41.6
The 750th results is for a work that appears to only include one of these six words - Hoang - and relevance score that is much lower: 16.4
Thus, increasing the number of search parameters could be a good strategy for you.
A couple of other things to note: if the author you are searching for has an ORCID iD, here’s a great opportunity to search for the author’s works using the ORCID iD.
For example: https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?filter=orcid:0000-0002-9117-4510
Also, we use the default scoring in Elasticsearch: Practical BM25 - Part 2: The BM25 Algorithm and its Variables | Elastic Blog
Please let me know if you have any additional questions,
Isaac
