Monday, March 15, 2010

Citation Tracker: Now with an API

A few months back I announced the availability of Citation Tracker, a tool that allows monitoring of your publications for incoming citations and mentions on the web. We received plenty of suggestions and we have been trying to implement them, with the hope of moving out of the alpha version by the end of the year.

Today, although we are still in alpha, I am happy to announce that we reached a major milestone: Citation Tracker now has a public API available!

We have posted documentation online and a sample PHP client for those that want to experiment. For details you can see the online documentation, but here is some brief description of the things that you can do through the API:
  • Publications: Add, remove, get, and edit publications. Pretty self-explanatory
    • Add publications
    • Delete publication
    • Edit publication
    • Get publications
  • Monitoring: Add, remove, get, and edit monitoring channels. A monitoring channel is an citation-oriented site (such as Google Scholar, Libra, SSRN), or a general web search engine (Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo). We monitor these sites for new results that match the publications and return back the new citations (or mentions, if we refer to general web results).
    • Add monitoring channel
    • Delete monitoring channel
    • Get active monitoring channels
    • Update monitoring channel
  • Citations: Get, update, and edit citations or web mentions, as returned by the different monitoring channels.
    • Get citations
    • Update citation state (new, accepted, discarded, review-later)
    • Update citation

Although we are still in alpha, NYU Library started using the tool and the API for creating a new service on top. I am sure that other people will have ideas of what they can do with the API. Enjoy and let me know if you have any feedback.