CrossRef API Tracing DOI Citations

Question

I'm using the habanero library to retrieve citation information given a DOI. I've hit a road block when trying to retrieve information about the works citing a given DOI. For instance,

from habanero import counts
c = counts.citation_count(doi = {DOI})

will give me the number of works that cited a DOI. Unfortunately, the DOI's I'm interested in are associated with data sets, so these counts are almost always going to be 1. What I really need is to count the citations of the work that references the DOI. For example, something like this:

from habanero import CrossRef
cr = CrossRef()
work = cr.works(ids = {DOI})
work['message']['references_count']

# what I'm really looking for is something like the following line
work['message']['references_dois']

I've been digging through the CrossRef documentation and I haven't been able to find anything that can help me achieve this.

Has anyone solved a similar problem?

Answer 1

About half of the CrossRef citations are available here: http://opencitations.net/index/coci. In particular, I think you need this call: http://opencitations.net/index/coci/api/v1#/citations/{doi}

Please let me know how it goes!!

Answer 2

From the Crossref website on the page Retrieving cited-by matches:

Publishers participating in Cited-by Linking are able to retrieve a list of items that cite a specific target article. Only the owner of the target article will be able to retrieve cited-by matches.

In other words, not everybody can obtain the doi of the citing articles.

However, the number of citing articles is available in the field is-referenced-by-count. See the api format page on the documentation of the rest-api for the details of the available fields.