Anysite now exposes the Crossref data API — 12 structured endpoints for querying Crossref's index of 183.7 million DOI-registered scholarly works, the journals and publishers that produced them, and the funders that supported them.
What is Crossref?
Crossref is a not-for-profit membership organization that maintains the world's largest database of scholarly metadata. Its 25,000+ member organizations — Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, the ACM, the APA, and thousands of society publishers — deposit bibliographic records and DOIs into a shared, open index. The result is the most comprehensive, publisher-authoritative catalog of scholarly output in existence: over 183.7 million works spanning articles, books, datasets, conference papers, and preprints.
Crossref's own API is free but rate-limited, requires careful pagination, and returns deeply nested JSON that varies by work type. Anysite's integration resolves all 12 Crossref surfaces through a single authenticated endpoint — one key, consistent output structure, and predictable rate limits.
The 12 endpoints
The new Crossref integration covers four data surfaces:
- Works — Look up any scholarly work by DOI (
/api/crossref/works), or search the full 183.7M+ index by title, author, journal, date range, ORCID, funder, work type, and more (/api/crossref/works/search). - Journals — Fetch journal metadata by ISSN (
/api/crossref/journals), search journals by keyword (/api/crossref/journals/search), or list all works published in a journal (/api/crossref/journals/works). - Members (publishers) — Look up publishers by Crossref member id (
/api/crossref/members), search publishers by name (/api/crossref/members/search), or list all works deposited by a publisher (/api/crossref/members/works). - Funders — Look up funders by Crossref Funder Registry id (
/api/crossref/funders), search the funder registry by name (/api/crossref/funders/search), or list all works a funder has supported (/api/crossref/funders/works). - Prefixes — Resolve any DOI prefix to its owning publisher and member id (
/api/crossref/prefixes).
What you can build
The combination of DOI lookup, full-text search, and graph traversal (works → journals → publishers → funders) unlocks several application patterns that are hard to support with the raw Crossref API:
- Literature discovery pipelines — search by topic, filter for works with abstracts and ORCID-verified authors, sort by publication date. Feed results into knowledge graphs or review tools without rate-limit gaps.
- Citation impact dashboards — each work lookup returns
is-referenced-by-count. Track citation velocity by combining DOI lookup with deposit date filters on the search endpoint. - Funder portfolio analysis — look up NSF or NIH in the Funder Registry, then pull all works they funded with grant numbers and award data. Map which journals or disciplines a funder supports.
- Publisher intelligence — search member publishers, resolve DOI prefixes to owning organizations, and enumerate a publisher's full deposit portfolio by member id.
Quick example
# Resolve a DOI to full scholarly metadata
curl -X POST https://api.anysite.io/api/crossref/works \
-H "access-token: YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"doi": "10.1145/3292500.3330701"}'The response includes the work's title, authors (with ORCIDs and affiliations), abstract, journal and publisher, all publication dates, citation count, funders with award numbers, license information, and a full structured reference list.
Access
The Crossref endpoints are available on all Anysite plans — no separate Crossref account or API key required. Full endpoint reference and live examples are on the Crossref endpoint page.