Hello forum readers!
Sometimes you might want to get a quick overview of cited-by counts for all articles in a given journal.
Instead of querying each individual DOI for each article in that journal and looking for the “crm-item name=“citedby-count”” value (in the XML API) or “is-referenced-by-count” value (in the REST API), there are a couple of ways to get those counts for all the articles at once.
One option would be to query the /works route of the API and filter by ISSN. You could also use the ‘select’ function to return only a list of DOIs and the cited-by count for each. For example
There’s a max of 1000 rows per query, so if the journal you’re querying for has more than 1000 article DOIs, you would then have to use the ‘cursor’ or ‘offset’ functions to page through additional results after the first 1000. See our API documentation at api.crossref.org for more details on both of those.
Or, alternatively, you could add additional filters to reduce the number of results per query, for example filtering by publication year, e.g.
If you’d prefer not to use the API at all, citation counts are also available via the Depositor Reports.
Depositor reports are meant for manual, not programatic, use. They’re accessible from a reports page here and organized by publisher name. That reports section of our website is old and in need of updating (we’re working on it!), so the page may take a long time to load.
That said, you can construct the depositor report links yourself using a journal’s ID number in the following format:
http://0-data-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/depositorreport?pubid=J{Journal-ID-Number}
And, you can find the journal IDs using the OAI-PMH harvester with the ‘ListSets’ verb.
For example, this will return all titles assocaited with prefix 10.1371 (Public Library of Science) and the journal ID for each:
https://0-oai-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/oai?verb=ListSets&set=J:10.1371
In the <setSpec> tags, the Journal ID the final number after the prefix.
<set>
<setSpec>J:10.1371:462944</setSpec>
<setName>PLOS Digital Health</setName>
</set>
So, the depositor report for “PLoS Digital Health” is accessible at
http://0-data-crossref-org.libus.csd.mu.edu/depositorreport?pubid=J462944
Once you access a depositor report, the cited-by count for each DOI is listed in the far right-hand column. And the reports can be downloaded as .csv files using File > Save Page As from your browser.
I hope this information helps anyone looking for per-journal cited-by counts. If you have any questions or additional thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment here.
Thanks,
Shayn