Crossref metadata search

Purpose

Search Crossref works metadata and save a structured JSON result set for citation discovery and DOI lookup.

When to use

• You need DOI-rich bibliographic metadata.
• You want a publisher-agnostic metadata pass to complement OpenAlex or PubMed.

When not to use

• You need article full text.
• You need biomedical indexing fields unique to PubMed or Europe PMC.

Inputs

• Title or topic query
• Optional --rows and --out

Outputs

• Crossref work-list JSON payload

Requirements

• Python 3.13+
• Network access to api.crossref.org

Procedure

1. Run python3 skills/scientific-knowledge/crossref-metadata-search/scripts/search_crossref.py --query-title "single-cell RNA-seq" --rows 3 --out skills/scientific-knowledge/crossref-metadata-search/assets/crossref_single_cell.json.
2. Inspect message.total-results and message.items.
3. Use returned DOIs as anchors for follow-up literature or provenance work.

Validation

• Command exits successfully.
• Output JSON contains message-type equal to work-list.
• At least one item is returned for a common topic.

Failure modes and fixes

• Empty results: simplify the title query.
• Rate or service issues: retry with smaller --rows and a descriptive user agent.

Safety and limits

• Metadata only; access to full content depends on publishers.
• Respect Crossref polite-use expectations.

Examples

• python3 .../search_crossref.py --query-title "spatial transcriptomics" --rows 2

Provenance

• Crossref REST API docs: https://www.crossref.org/documentation/retrieve-metadata/rest-api/

Related skills

• openalex-literature-search
• ncbi-pubmed-search