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Crossref REST API

Authoritative metadata and DOIs for 165M+ scholarly records, no key

Crossref is the DOI registration agency for scholarly publishing; its REST API exposes deposited metadata for 165M+ journal articles, books, datasets and preprints, including titles, authors, references, funders, licenses and ORCID/ROR IDs. It is open with no key; adding your email unlocks the faster, more stable polite pool.

Free tier

Free, no key. Optional Metadata Plus tier (paid) for guaranteed throughput

Rate limits

Not published as fixed numbers; the public and polite pool limits were revised on 1 Dec 2025. The polite pool (with mailto) gets higher, more stable limits than the anonymous pool

Auth

No key

Base URL

https://api.crossref.org

What you'd build with it

  • Resolve a DOI to clean citation metadata for a reference manager
  • Validate and de-duplicate bibliographies in a research automation
  • Search the scholarly record by funder, license or publication date
  • Pull reference lists to build a local citation graph

Key endpoints

  • GET/works/{doi}Full metadata for a single DOI
  • GET/works?query={q}Search works by free text, with facets and filters
  • GET/journals/{issn}/worksAll works in a journal by ISSN
  • GET/funders?query={name}Look up funder registry records
Members

Members get the runnable recipe

Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.

Tags

knowledgeresearchdoicitationsreference