How to get author details from the API?

Software Support
1

I’ve been trying to work with the API to extract publication metadata from OJS so that it can be manipulated and used for various tasks, like typesetting articles and generating a static mirror of the journal website.

However, the API only gives the full author string and the short author string.

authorString: “Author One, Author Two, Author Three, Author Four”
authorStringShort: “One et al.”

This makes it difficult to use the API to get author details because I then need to guess which author name is the surname. While it’s usually the last name, some authors have multiple parts to their surname so it would be easier to extract the surname as entered into OJS.

It would also be nice to get some richer metadata from the API, like author affiliation and ORCIDs. Other than author information it would be really useful to get things like the abstract (which is listed as something that I should get but I haven’t seen in OJS 3.3.0.6), funding details, acceptance dates, subjects, key words and references.

Thanks

3

You can get all of the author metadata from the authors property. It is an array of author objects. When looking at the API docs, you can expand some of the properties on the right to reveal details about that property. In the screenshot below, I’ve expanded the authors property in the right-hand panel.

api-authors

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4

Sorry, I missed this part:

  • abstract, subjects, keywords and references are part of the publication object, and should be returned with (submissions/{submissionId}/publications/{publicationId}). If you’re not getting it, something is wrong. For example, if you see an abstract property with a null value, that means there is no abstract for that publication.
  • funding details: is this from a plugin? I’m not aware of it. But a plugin would be responsible for attaching data to the API output.
  • acceptance dates: this is not currently available, but we may or may not make this available through a /submissions/{submissionId}/decisions API endpoint in the next major version (3.4). We’re working on that now.
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5

That helps a lot. So, instead of making the query with just journalpath/api/v1/submissions/{submissionId}, I need to get the publicationId from this response, then make another query to journalpath/api/v1/submissions/{submissionId}/publications/{publicationID} to get the author details, abstract, disciplines, keywords, references and more.

Funding - I think would definitely be a plugin.

This is much better. I can get 90% of the way there with this. Thanks!

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