Crossref

I wrote about Crossref clients back nearly two years ago on this blog: Crossref programmatic clients. Since it’s been a while, it seems worth talking again about the the many ways to work programmatically with Crossref data - and focus in on the Python client habanero since it has some recent updates. The 3 clients work with the main Crossref API, which lets you do things like search for works by title, author, etc. (e.g., books, articles), search for publishing members, for funders, for journals, for DOI prefixes, and for licenses. It’s a powerful API with basically no rate limits, so you can work through lots of data quickly. ...

I gave two talks recently at the annual Crossref meeting, one of which was a somewhat technical overview of programmatic clients for Crossref APIs. Check out the talk here. I talked about the motivation for working with Crossref data by writing code/etc. rather than going the GUI route, then went over the various clients, with brief examples. We (rOpenSci) have been working on the R client rcrossref for a while now, but I’m also working on the Python and Ruby clients for Crossref. In addition, the Ruby client has a CLI client inside. The Javascript client is worked on independently by ScienceAI. ...

I’ve been learning Ruby, and decided to scratch an itch: getting citations for papers to put in a bibtex file or my Zotero library. This usually requires two parts: 1) searching for an article with keywords, and then 2) getting the citation once the paper is found. Since I am lazy, I would prefer to do this from the command line instead of opening up a browser. Thus => cites. (Note, I’m sure someone has created something better - the point is I’m learnin’ me some Ruby) cites does two things: ...