url2id

A Go library + web server to extract standard identifiers from a given URL.

Intended for all scientific literature only.

Standard Identifiers

• DOI (Digital Object Identifier)
• PMID (PubMeb Identifier)
• PMCID (PubMeb Central Identifier)
• Manuscript IDs
  • NIHMSID (U.S. National Institutes of Health Manuscripts Identifier)
  • EMSID (Europe PubMed Central Manuscripts Identifier)
  • CAMSID (PubMed Central Canada Manuscripts Identifier)

High-Level Description

url2id will fetch the web-page referred by url and scan it for identifiers.

Documentation

For the library, see the source code, it's really short.

The web server will listen on :8080 by default, but you can change the port by PORT environment variable.

Any GET request to / with parameter url will be responded by a JSON of the following type on success:

{
    "doi": "10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.051",
    "pmid": "22521786",
    "pmcid": "PMC3780767",
    "nihmsid": "NIHMS236863",
    "emsid": "EMS48932",
    "camsid": "cams6038"    
}

On failure, appropriate HTTP status code will be set (often either 400 or 500), with a high-level error message (details will be logged by the server).

Empty keys will be omitted.

Notice

url2id does not rely on the structure of the websites but uses few simple regexes to extract information. This makes it resilient to changes (on the websites) in future, fast and also simple, but it also means that errors are probable.

DOI extraction seems to be the most reliable of all other standard identifiers, and it's widely supported by variety of platforms. Thus it might be wise to fetch the title of the paper using the DOI you have got from url2id and cross-check (if you are intending to use this in a bibliography software for instance).

License

ISC License, see LICENSE.