About the Metadata Retrieval category

The collective power of our members’ metadata is available to use through a variety of tools and APIs—allowing anyone to search and reuse the metadata in sophisticated ways.

Members register content with us to let the world know it exists. They send us information called metadata which we collect and store in a standard way. We make this metadata openly available via our APIs, which means people and machines can incorporate it in their research tools and services.

To retrieve metadata from Crossref, you do not need to be a member. We have various options for retrieving metadata - some are more suitable for human use, and some for machine use.

There are interfaces for people (to look up small numbers of DOIs): Metadata Search, and Simple Text Query.

There are APIs for machines (to look up metadata records or DOIs in volume), including: REST API, XML API, OAI-PMH, and OpenURL.

Please use this category for general questions and discussion about Crossref metadata retrieval and usage.