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Elsevier Developer Portal

Retrieving Scopus Cited-By counts

If you haven't already done so, please register for an APIKey here. After you've registered, cited-by count retrieval is straightforward. A typical request URL would be:

http://api.elsevier.com/content/search/scopus?query=DOI(10.1016/j.stem.2011.10.002)&field=citedby-count

Notes:
- You'll need to pass in your API Key as an HTTP request header:

X-ELS-APIKey: [APIKey]

- This example uses the DOI as the document identifier to search on. Another common identifier supported by the API is the PubMed ID (PMID). If you happen to know the Scopus ID (SCP) of the document, you can use that. Examples:

http://api.elsevier.com/content/search/scopus?query=PMID(22136928)&field=citedby-count
http://api.elsevier.com/content/search/scopus?query=SCOPUS-ID(82755170946)&field=citedby-count

- The 'field' parameter is optional - using it as in the example, '&field=citedby-count', tells the API to only return the cited-by count. If you don't use the 'field' parameter you'll get a pre-canned result which we call a 'view'.
- You can use OR statements in the 'query' field of the URL to get the cited-by counts for multiple documents in one go - e.g.:
http://api.elsevier.com/content/search/scopus?query=DOI(10.1016/j.stem.2011.10.002)+OR+DOI(10.1098/rsbl.2011.0293)&field=citedby-count,prism:doi

This example uses both 'citedby-count' and 'prism:doi' as a value for the 'field' parameter. This tells the API to return the DOI for every cited-by count in the response, which will allow you to map the cited-by counts to the DOIs you passed into my request.

- If you use any of these methods to get those counts, then please do keep in mind that we request that wherever you show them, you have to attribute and link back to the cited-by list on Scopus - something like "Cited x times in Scopus". The URL to use for that link is actually returned in the standard pre-canned API response, and looks something like: 

<link href="http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&amp;scp=79960866967" ref="scopus-citedby"/>

- For more information about the options that the Scopus search API provides, you can look at the Scopus search API documentation.