CitEc : API (citedby)

The purpose of this API is to enable external applications to query the CitEc database and obtain record data through a simple web interface. This page contains all documentation available at the moment. If you require more details or want to use the API, get in contact with us: barrueco at uv.es

The API accepts HTTP requests and returns XML formated responses

The base URL to access the API is: http://citec.repec.org/api/

The structure of the HTTP request is as follows:

http://citec.repec.org/api/[plain|amf|citedby]/repec_id

The API allows to retrieve three different types of data for each document: plain, AMF (Academic Metadata Format) and citedby. For instance, for document with repec_id RePEc:imf:imfwpa:01/191, we could have:

1. plain: http://citec.repec.org/api/plain/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:01/191 : plain data about cites of a single document. The XML response is self-explanatory:
   <citationData id="RePEc:imf:imfwpa:01/191">
<date>2014-12-05T10:17:36</date>
<uri>http://citec.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:01/191</uri>
<citedBy>20</citedBy>
<cites>11</cites>
</citationData>
where:
   
   • date: is the time when the report was created
   • uri: is the url of the detailed citation report in CitEc. Used to link back to CitEc pages from the user application.
   • citedBy: is the number of citations the document has at the time
   • cites: is the number of the references cited by the document. Such references have automatically extracted from the documents and may contain errors.
2. amf : http://citec.repec.org/api/amf/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:01/191 : amf metadata for cites and references (if available) for the document. The XML response is an AMF record. More details about the amf schema is available at: http://amf.openlib.org/doc/ebisu.html.
3. citedby : http://citec.repec.org/api/citedby/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:01/191 : shows the cites for the document. By default, the xml output is transformed through an xslt style sheet to generate an human readable page.

Finally, the API may return error messages when the request fails. They are strings enconded in a symple XML response. The most usual error messages are:

• <errorString>Requested document not found</errorString> The repec_id requested is not in the database.
• <errorString>Bad query</errorString> The query doesn't follow the format required
• <errorString>Bad return format. Available formats are: amf | plain</errorString>
• <errorString>Bad RePEc handle</errorString> The repec_id provided is not valid.
• <errorString>Error: problem connecting to database</errorString>

The International Monetary Fund is already using this API. You can see an example of implementation here

The API has an initial limitation of 500 requests. If you need more, please get in contact with us in order to obtain an access key.

Note that we could provide periodic (daily/weekly/monthly) dumps of your citation data (document ids/number of citations plus all the additional data you may need) in the format more appropriate for you, to be included/used in your systems as you like. Get in contact for more details.