Crossref

Information about Crossref queries

The Crossref search pane in Publish or Perish allows you to perform a Crossref search and analyse its results; it contains a structured version of the parameters accepted by Crossref. Publish or Perish uses these parameters to perform a Crossref search, which is then analyzed and converted to a number of statistics. The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting in other applications) or saved to a text file (for future reference or further analysis).

How to perform a Crossref search

To perform a Crossref search:

  1. Enter the relevant parameters in the various fields (see below for an explanation of each parameter);
  2. Click Search or press the Enter key.

The program will now contact Crossref Metadata Search to obtain the citations, process the list, and calculate the citation metrics, which are then displayed in the results list. The full list of results is also available for inspection or modifications and can be exported in a variety of formats.

Attributes

This pane contains the following fields.

Option Description
Authors

Enter the names of the authors you want to look up (last names or initials plus last names), but please note that author searches in Crossref are not very reliable.

For general tips on search syntax, see Author search.

Years

Enter the range of years in which the papers must have been published. You can set either year to 0 (zero) to indicate "don't care".

Affiliations

Enter the affilations that you want to search for. For tips on search syntax, see Affiliation search.

Publication/
Journal

Enter the name of the publication or journal you want to look up. For tips on search syntax, see Journal search.

ISSN

Enter the ISSNs of the journals you want to look up. The ISSNs must use the format dddd-dddd, i.e., 4 digits, a hyphen, and another 4 digits.

Title words

Enter words from the title of the articles that you want to look up.

Note that Crossref does not support the usual Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT; all terms that you use in the Title words field are treated as if they were OR-ed together.

For general tips on search syntax, see General/keyword search.

Keywords

Enter any additional words that must appear alone or in combination in the returned papers. This can be used to narrow down the search for a specific set of papers.

Note that Crossref does not support the usual Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT; all terms that you use in the Keywords field are treated as if they were OR-ed together.

For general tips on search syntax, see General/keyword search.

Search

Perform the search. If possible, the search is satisfied from the local Publish or Perish cache; this saves time and reduces the load on Crossref. If no cache entry for the search exists or the entry is older than the maximum cache age, then the search parameters are forwarded to Crossref. After the results are received from Crossref, the local cache is automatically refreshed.

Tip: You can change the maximum cache age in the Preferences: Crossref dialog box, which is accessible through the Tools > Preferences command.

Search Direct

Submit the search directly to Crossref, bypassing the local Publish or Perish cache. This may be useful if you suspect that Crossref may have newer information than is available through the local cache. When the results are returned from Crossref, the local cache is automatically refreshed.

It is not useful to perform multiple direct lookups for the same query shortly after another; this merely increases the load on Crossref. We recommend that you only use the Search Direct function as a last resort.

Clear All Clears all search fields. You can use this to quickly prepare the fields for an entirely new search.
Revert Restores the search fields to their previous state. This function is only available as long as you have not performed a lookup with the current search fields.
New

Menu button that displays a popup menu from which you can create a new search.

The fields of the new search will be pre-populated from the fields in the current search; this makes it easy to use the same or very similar search parameters across a number of searches or data sources.