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Research Guides

Text and Data Mining (TDM) at University of Toronto

This guide introduces the U of T researchers and students to recourses available to them if they wish to undertake a TDM project, outlining available datasets and platforms, corpus creation, and APIs

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

APIs 

What is an API?

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of rules that allows other machines and users to work with data without having to go through a visual interface. APIs are sets of rules and instructions that tell you

What you can do
Allowed actions on the data: read, create, update, delete, trigger tasks, etc.

How to ask
The precise format of the request: URLs, parameters, headers, authentication, etc..

What you’re allowed to touch
Access rules and limits: which data are available, what endpoints are exposed, required permissions, etc.

APIs are not the data itself, nor are they computer programs. They are sets of rules that explain how to work with data from a specific source. 

APIs for Journal Articles

In the case of using publisher APIs to access articles, we are only interested in requesting data, also known as a GET request. We can use an API to make a request that can specify what data we'd like to retrieve using metadata like we would in an article database. 

Different APIs have different rules. It's important to consult the documentation for APIs to understand

  • What data is available
  • Which endpoint you should use
  • How to structure your request
  • Any limits on how many requests you can make and any rate limits

Why Use an API

Generally, APIs are useful if you need to get a lot of data, for example more journal articles than the database interface allows you to download at a time, or if you want to retrieve data in a specific format, like plain text or JSON, that is unavailable through database interface. Being able to automatically rather than manually download items can save a lot of time. 

How do I find APIs

This guide lists common publisher APIs. Because publishers frequently update services and new ones appear, always do a quick web search if you don’t see what you need.

How Do I Use APIs?

Generally speaking, using an API will require some coding or an API tool like Postman. We recommend the following resources to learn more. 

Crossref has an API Learning Hub 

Postman (an API platform) also has a Learning Hub 

 

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