ISBN citation of books

[dhimmel]

While many scholarly books have DOIs, there are lot's of books out there with just ISBNs. As a standardized identifier, they seem appropriate for Manubot book citations. We discussed the issue in greenelab/deep-review#387 and found serveral ISBN lookup services.

However, none of them are aware of the 2012 Open Access Book indicating poor coverage:

• https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/9780262302524
• http://isbndb.com/search/all?query=9780262302524
• http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9780262302524?method=getMetadata&format=xml&fl=*

Update: I think 9780262302524 is the wrong ISBN, but was listed on the MIT Press website.

@agapow commented:

My impression of worldcat and isbndb is that there's quite a lag before titles get listed (and they may never get listed). Not a solution, but we probably need another way.

So the purpose of this issue is to note that ISBN citation would be valuable and to track any potential solutions.

[dhimmel]

Just came across https://github.com/xlcnd/isbnlib a python package which can retrieve metadata from ISBNs. Another package is pyisbn at https://github.com/JNRowe/pyisbn.

[agitter]

To follow up on #70 (comment), I tested the Open Access book in Citoid and it worked:
https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/data/citation/mediawiki/9780262517638

[
  {
    "itemType": "book",
    "date": "2012",
    "publisher": "MIT Press",
    "title": "Open access",
    "oclc": "795846161",
    "url": "https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/795846161",
    "ISBN": [
      "9780262301732",
      "0262301733"
    ],
    "place": "Cambridge, Massachusetts",
    "numPages": "1 online resource (xii, 242 pages)",
    "abstractNote": "A concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is (and isn't) and showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and beneficial",
    "author": [
      [
        "Suber,",
        "Peter,"
      ]
    ],
    "accessDate": "2018-10-12",
    "source": [
      "WorldCat"
    ]
  }
]

[dhimmel]

Testing ISBNs

I found this gist of 500 ISBNs, which could be handy for testing purposes.