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Crossref API: Get citation

Gets a formatted citation and publication details for the best-matching Crossref work by title or DOI. Optional author and year help choose among similar works; citations reflect the metadata deposited with Crossref.

crossref.org (opens in a new tab)Version 1ReadNo sign-inVerified Nov 2, 2026

Unofficial. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Crossref.

Inputs

Values from the run on Oct 31, 2026, shown under Output.

Work, requiredwork

Paper or book title or DOI, for example The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or 10.1038/nrd842.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Year optionalyear

Publication year to help select a work, for example 1996.

2012

Whole number.

Style optionalstyle

Citation style, for example mla.

chicago

One of apa, mla, chicago, harvard, ieee, vancouver. Default apa.

Author optionalauthor

Author to help select a work, for example Thomas S. Kuhn.

Thomas S. Kuhn

Default .

Output

From a run on Oct 31, 2026.
{  "doi": "10.7208/chicago/9780226458144.001.0001",  "type": "book",  "year": 2012,  "issue": null,  "pages": null,  "title": "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions",  "volume": null,  "authors": [    "Thomas S. Kuhn",    "Ian Hacking"  ],  "citation": "Kuhn, Thomas S., and Ian Hacking. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226458144.001.0001.",  "doi_link": "https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226458144.001.0001",  "journal_or_publisher": "University of Chicago Press"}
Price
1 credit per completed run (1¢ with pay as you go); failed runs are free.
Method
crossref.org/get_citation
Returns
title, authors, journal or publisher, volume, issue, pages, year, type, DOI, formatted citation

Use it from your agent

Give your agent this line. It reads SKILL.md, gets a Fous API key and connects the Fous MCP server. Its run then takes the method crossref.org/get_citation with the inputs above.

Ask your agent

  • Can you give me an APA citation for the paper with DOI 10.1126/science.1225829?
  • I need an MLA reference for "Attention Is All You Need" by Vaswani, 2017 — include volume and pages if there are any.
  • Look up "Deep residual learning for image recognition" on Crossref and format it in IEEE style.
  • Format a Vancouver-style reference for the 2001 Nature paper on the initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome.
  • Pull the Chicago citation from crossref.org for Mayr's "The Growth of Biological Thought" (1982), with publisher and year.

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