Scholarly Papers by DOI or Search (Crossref)

Look up research papers by DOI, or search more than 160 million scholarly works (journal articles, books, conference papers, preprints, datasets) by topic, year and type. Each paper comes back with its title, authors, journal, year, citation count, abstract and a ready-made APA citation.

The data is Crossref's open metadata, read through Crossref's official REST API. Crossref is the registry most publishers use for their DOIs.

Who it's for

• AI agents and research assistants that need "the full citation for this DOI" or "the most-cited papers on X" in the middle of a task. Inputs are one line and outputs are small.
• Researchers and students building reading lists and reference lists.
• Librarians, analysts and publishers checking metadata and citation counts in bulk.

Input

Field	What it does
DOIs	Papers to look up: 10.1038/nature12373, doi:10.1038/... or a https://doi.org/... link. Up to 500
Search for	Words to search titles, authors, journals and abstracts for
Type	Search only: journal articles, book chapters, books, conference papers, preprints, datasets, dissertations or reports
From year / To year	Search only: the publication year range
Order	Search only: Best match, Newest first or Most cited first
Max search results	Up to 1,000 (default 20). DOIs you list are always looked up
Include abstracts	On by default

Examples:

{ "dois": ["10.1038/nature12373", "https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253"] }

{ "query": "crispr gene editing", "type": "journal-article", "fromYear": 2020, "sort": "most-cited", "maxItems": 50 }

Output

One row per paper. A real example:

{
  "doi": "10.1038/nature12373",
  "title": "Nanometre-scale thermometry in a living cell",
  "authors": ["G. Kucsko", "P. C. Maurer", "N. Y. Yao", "M. Kubo", "H. J. Noh", "P. K. Lo", "H. Park", "M. D. Lukin"],
  "year": 2013,
  "published": "2013-07-31",
  "journal": "Nature",
  "publisher": "Springer Science and Business Media LLC",
  "type": "journal-article",
  "volume": "500",
  "issue": "7460",
  "pages": "54-58",
  "citedBy": 1851,
  "references": 30,
  "abstract": null,
  "subjects": [],
  "issn": ["0028-0836", "1476-4687"],
  "url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12373",
  "citation": "Kucsko, G., Maurer, P. C., Yao, N. Y., Kubo, M., Noh, H. J., Lo, P. K., Park, H., & Lukin, M. D. (2013). Nanometre-scale thermometry in a living cell. Nature, 500(7460), 54-58. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12373",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-19T12:00:00Z"
}

A DOI Crossref doesn't know gets one free row with an error that says so.

Pricing

Pay per result: $2.00 per 1,000 papers. Error rows are free. You can set a spending limit on any run, and the run stops cleanly when it's reached.

Good to know

• Abstracts come from the publisher. Many publishers deposit them with Crossref and some don't. Where there's none, abstract is null.
• citedBy counts citations within Crossref's data. It's usually lower than Google Scholar's figure, which also counts sources outside Crossref.
• Some DOIs aren't Crossref's. Most datasets, for example, are registered with DataCite. Those DOIs get an error row.
• Authors are listed by name only, as printed on the paper. We don't return their affiliations, ORCID iDs or contact details.