Retrieve doi from title and author

Metadata Retrieval
,
1

I would like to retrieve the doi for items for which I know the title, author, and year of publication. If I do
https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?query.bibliographic="' . $title . ', ' . $author . ' ' . $year . '"&rows=1
I get a vast amount of information. All I want is the doi. Searches of your documentation and googling suggest that there is no way to do that, although that is hard to believe. Is it really not possible?

2

Hi Martin,

If you add “&select=DOI” to the end of any query, the results list will just include the DOI for each record.

For example:
https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?query.bibliographic=Carberry,%20J.%20(2008).%20Toward%20a%20Unified%20Theory%20of%20High-Energy%20Metaphysics:%20Silly%20String%20Theory.%20Journal%20of%20Psychoceramics,%205(11),%201–3.&select=DOI

It won’t return a single DOI, because the results are ordered by relevance score. For that reason, I wouldn’t actually suggest that you limit the results to only the DOI, without a way to identify whether you’re getting back the publication that you’re actually querying for.

You can add additional select parameters as needed, for example, title, container-title, and authors, which will give you a clearer sense of the matching item. Compare this to the above:

https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/works?query.bibliographic=Carberry,%20J.%20(2013).%20Is%20Psychoceramics%20All%20It%20Is%20Cracked%20Up%20To%20Be?%20Annals%20of%20Psychoceramics%20B,%202013,%209–14.&select=DOI,title,container-title,author

I hope that helps clarify. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

-Shayn

3

Wonderful — thank you! Now I see there is documentation at
https://0-api-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/swagger-ui/index.html#/Works/get_works
(I had previously looked at that page, but had not clicked on the “Works” tab — I guess I didn’t understand what “Endpoints that expose works related data” means. Wouldn’t it be clearer to say something nontechnical like “Queries that return publication information”?)