Political Science: APIs for Scholarly Resources

Scholarly APIs and Resources

This is a list of datasets or resources that provide an API (Application Program Interface) or some bulk download mechanism for obtaining data in various formats (numeric, textual, images) for computational research with a focus on scholarly resources. Also check out the curated github awesome list of high-quality open datasets that includes corpora & network analysis data.

**This list is heavily adapted from Cody Hennessy's APIs for Scholarly Research at UC Berkeley & Mark Clemente's APIs for Scholarly Resources at MIT.**

ADS: SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System API
The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a digital library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant.
Alpha Vantage Open Stock APIs
Free programmatic access to stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, foreign exchange rates, financial reports from SEC filings, and over 50 derived technical indicators. Free API key allows up to 500 API calls per day by default. More information: (1) introduction to stock APIs, (2) official API documentation
arXiv API
API access to Cornell's open-access arXiv e-print repository, used primarily by physics, mathematics and computer science communities to share cutting-edge research.
BioMed Central API
A variety of access points to BioMed Central's corpus of 150,000 peer-reviewed articles, including a guide to text-mining the collection.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Public Data Application Programming Interface (API) gives the public access to economic data from all BLS programs.
CourtListener APIs, Webhooks, and Bulk Legal Data
Includes bulk access to caselaw, financial disclosure, judge data, and oral arguments data.
Chronicling America API
API access to information about American english language historic (pre-1923) newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages from the Library of Congress.
CommonCrawl
Provides open access web crawl data. Dataset contains 2PB of data and over 1.95 billion webpages.
CORE API
CORE The world’s largest collection of open access research papers. The API provides real-time machine access to metadata and full texts of research papers in CORE.
Crossref REST API - Text and data mining for researchers
Crossref is a not-for-profit membership organization for scholarly publishing who works to make content easy to find, cite, link, and assess. The Crossref API allows researchers to easily harvest full-text documents from all participating members, regardless of whether the content is open access or subscription. Explanatory slides
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) API Codex
Access data from the DPLA repostiory of cultural and scientific knowledge, including partner data from Harvard, NY Public Library, ARTstor, the David Rumsey Historical Map collection and more. Zipped json files of partner data and the entire repository are available for bulk download.
Elsevier Text & Data Mining APIs
Elsevier's license-based approach automatically enables researchers at subscribing institutions to text mine their institution's subscribed and open access content for non-commercial research purposes and to gain access to full-text content in XML for this purpose.
Europeana API
Europeana APIs allow users to build applications that drawn from the collections of major museums and galleries across Europe.
Europe PubMed Central
A RESTful Web Service giving you access to all of the publications and related information in the Europe PubMed Central database.
Google Books Ngram Viewer datasets
The Google Books Ngram Viewer provides a frontend to explore word counts from the entire corpus of digitized Google books. Google also provides access to the thousands of raw datasets on which the Viewer operates. More information: TED Talk on Google Ngrams.
Harvard Library's APIs and datasets
LibraryCloud contains records from Harvard's Alma instance (over 12.7M bib records), SharedShelf (4M image records), and ArchivesSpace finding aids (2M finding aid components). The Harvard Library Bibliographic Metadata collection is an open access data set that provides a snapshot of HOLLIS bibliographic records and holdings records.
HathiTrust Extracted Features Dataset
The HTRC Extracted Features Dataset v.2.0 is composed of page-level features for 17.1 million volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library. This version contains non-consumptive features for both public-domain and in-copyright books. Features include part-of-speech tagged term token counts, header/footer identification, marginal character counts, and much more.
IEEE Xplore® API Portal
Query the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers content repository of IEEE journals, conference proceedings, and technical standards
JSTOR Data for Research
Not an API per se, but you can use DFR to select and interact with data and metadata from JSTOR's archive of scholarly journal literature (more than 7 million journal articles) and primary resources (26,000 19th Century British Pamphlets).
Library of Congress APIs
Explore the many ways the Library of Congress provides machine-readable access to its digital collections.
NASA open datasets
Over 31,000 datasets, 190 code repositories, & 30 APIs.
NLM Products and Services: APIs
A directory of the National Library of Medicine's eresources. Limit to API to find medical resource APIs including PubMedCentral, MedlinePlus, AIDSinfo, ClinicalTrials.gov, Drug Interactions, and more
SpringerOpen
Open, bibliographic search service for content hosted on springeropen.com, comprising around half a million research journals and citations (see also SpringerOpen API).
NCBI E-utilities API
Set of 8 server-side programs for the Entrez query and database system at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
Check out the R package, Rentrez, for a wrapper to the NCBI API.
New York Times APIs
Includes archive API (all NYT article metadata for a given month), article search API, books API, most popular articles API, and more.
OECD data API
The OECD dataset APIs let you programmatically access a selection of our top used datasets covering data for OECD countries and selected non-member economies. OECD datasets are dynamically updated.
Open American National Corpus
Text corpus of American English containing over 22 million words.
OpenLibrary APIs
Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published.
ORCID API
Query the ORCID researcher identifier system (including individual researchers, universities, national laboratories, commercial research organizations, research funders, publishers, national science agencies, data repositories, and international professional societies) to obtain researcher profile data.
PLOS Search API
Query content from the seven open-access peer-reviewed journals from the Public Library of Science using any of the twenty-three terms in the PLOS Search. Data also available as bulk downloads.
Public Datasets
A github 'awesome' list of curated public datasets on various topics and areas including corpora and social networking data.
PubMed Central OAI-PMH service
Provides access to metadata of all items in the PubMed Central (PMC) archive, as well as to the full text of a subset of these items.
rOpenSci
"Open source R packages that provide programmatic access to a variety of scientific data, full-text of journal articles, and repositories that provide real-time metrics of scholarly impact."
Springer API Portal
Robust set of APIs for metadata, images and articles from this scientific publisher of books and journals, including close to 500 academic and professional society journals.
UN Comtrade Web Services
Access data from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics database, including International Merchandise Trade Statistics (IMTS) and the work of the International Merchandise Trade Statistics Section (IMTSS) of the United Nations Statistics Division. Sign in required to access developer tools including API.
Web of Sciences Web Services
Query over 8,000 of the leading journals in the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences, indexed by Web of Science to return limited article information including article title, authors, source data, and author supplied keywords. Note: not all APIs are included in UCSD's access; for those that are (such as Extended), users need to register and submit an application.
Worldbank APIs
Three APIs to provide access to different datasets: one for Indicators (or time series data), one for Projects (or data on the World Bank’s operations), and one for the World Bank financial data (World Bank Finances API).