Retrieving publication IDs
Every top-level publication in Crossref is assigned a unique publication ID. Publication IDs are mainly used for internal purposes, but may be useful when retrieving data using OAI-PMH, or identifying a specific title. For most purposes, publication IDs are always preceded by the publication type (J, B, or S). B indicates non-journal publications including books, conference proceedings, standards, reports, dissertations, posted content, and datasets.
Publication IDs may be retrieved via the following:
- OAI-PMH: an OAI-PMH ListSets request will return titles and publication IDs for journals, books, conference proceedings, and series-level data:
https://oai.crossref.org/OAIHandler?verb=ListSets
https://oai.crossref.org/OAIHandler?verb=ListSets&set=B
J (journal) is the default set, set=B must be specified to retrieve book or conference proceeding titles, and S for series-level titles. Sets may be further limited by member prefix
- The publication ID is listed within the
<setspec> element, after the set and member prefix. For example, within the following set, 24 is the publication ID for Journal of Clinical Psychology:
<set>
<setSpec>J:10.1002:24</setSpec>
<setName>Journal of Clinical Psychology</setName>
</set>
- Browsable title list: this list includes the publication ID next to each title in the search results. Click
to reveal the ID - UNIXSD metadata: the UNIXSD output format includes the
journal-id (J) or book-id (B).
