OpenCitations
OpenCitations is an open science research infrastructure providing free access to scholarly bibliographic and citation data. It offers REST APIs for querying citation networks, DOI-based citation lookups, reference data, and bibliographic metadata from millions of research articles. All data is published under CC0 Public Domain Waiver for unrestricted reuse.
Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.
API Evangelist profiles OpenCitations the way a machine reads it — 21 machine-readable artifacts across 2 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — OpenCitations scores 28.3/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 26/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance. Every facet and dimension name is a link: it opens that measurement's page on APIs.io, where the rating runs across the whole catalog — the exact checks that feed it, how every profiled provider distributes on it, and who is at the top of it.
Put this on your own site. The badge is drawn live from OpenCitations's current Kin Score — paste it once and it updates itself every time the score is recomputed. It follows your visitor's light or dark setting, and it links back here so anyone who sees it can read the full breakdown.
<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/opencitations/"
title="OpenCitations on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/opencitations.svg"
alt="OpenCitations Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="150" height="150" loading="lazy">
</a>
[](https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/opencitations/)
<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/opencitations/"
title="OpenCitations on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/opencitations/card.svg"
alt="OpenCitations Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="340" height="120" loading="lazy">
</a>
More shapes, themes and sizes → · Score as JSON · How badges work
How we profile OpenCitations
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for OpenCitations. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 6
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
OpenCitations SPARQL Endpoint
SPARQL endpoints for structured queries against the OpenCitations Meta and Index datasets. Provides access to the full Linked Open Data graph for both bibliographic metadata and...
OpenCitations Authors API
Operations for retrieving works by author
OpenCitations Citations API
Operations for retrieving citation metadata and counts
OpenCitations Editors API
Operations for retrieving works by editor
OpenCitations Metadata API
Operations for retrieving bibliographic metadata
OpenCitations References API
Operations for retrieving outgoing reference data
Open Collections 6
Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
API Collection
OPEN COLLECTIONOpenCitations Index REST Authors API
OPEN COLLECTIONOpenCitations Index REST Authors Citations API
OPEN COLLECTIONOpenCitations Index REST Authors Editors API
OPEN COLLECTIONOpenCitations Index REST Authors Metadata API
OPEN COLLECTIONOpenCitations Index REST Authors References API
OPEN COLLECTIONSemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Opencitations Context
JSON-LDExamples 5
Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.
Example request and response payloads for these APIs.
Author Works
EXAMPLECitation By Oci
EXAMPLECitation Count
EXAMPLEIncoming Citations
EXAMPLEMetadata Lookup
EXAMPLESecurity Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for OpenCitations — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Access & Security 2
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/opencitations · machine-readable index on apis.io
This is an independent, third-party profile of OpenCitations, published by API Evangelist. We do not operate, host, resell, or support these APIs, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by the company unless stated above. Everything here is built from publicly available information — the company's own site, developer portal, documentation, public repositories, and the specifications it publishes for public use. Nothing is obtained by breaching a system, defeating an access control, or using credentials.
The Kin Score and Agent Readiness rating are independently calculated assessments of a company's public API artifacts, scored against a published rubric. They are not certifications, endorsements, security assessments, or audits.
Corrections, re-scores, and removal are free — no partnership or purchase required, and you do not need to justify the request. A removed company is recorded as unrated, never scored zero for having asked. Acknowledgement within one business day; removal within two.
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