Journal abbreviation in crossref

Crossref admin
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1

Hi, If possible we pass the DOI and get the journal abbreviation from Crossref. Journal abbreviation available in crossref DB?

Thanks,
Perumal N.

2

Hello, and thanks for your question.

Yes, if you query a DOI in either of our APIs you can see the journal abbreviation that was supplied by that DOI’s publisher.

In the XML API it will appear as “<abbrev_title>”. In the REST API, it will appear as “short-container-title”.

For example, the XML API query for 10.1017/S0003055424000030 is
https://doi.crossref.org/search/doi?pid={your-email-address-goes-here}&format=unixsd&doi=10.1017/S0003055424000030

And the journal-level metadata looks like this:

<journal_metadata language="en">
<full_title>American Political Science Review</full_title>
<abbrev_title>Am Polit Sci Rev</abbrev_title>
<issn media_type="print">0003-0554</issn>
<issn media_type="electronic">1537-5943</issn>
</journal_metadata>

The REST API query for that same DOI’s metadata record is
https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1017/S0003055424000030
The full journal title there looks like this:

"container-title": [
"American Political Science Review"
],

And the abbreviated journal title looks like this:

"short-container-title": [
"Am Polit Sci Rev"
],

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

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3

Thankyou so much Shayn!! if possible to pass Full journal title and get abbreviated title? Kindly send that method if have.

Thanks,
Perumal N.

4

Hi Perumal,

Not directly. The results from the /journals route don’t include the abbreviated title.

So, you’d need to query the /works route, and then find the short-container-title value in the record of one of the works within that journal.

for example a query for “BRICS Journal of Economics” like this
https://api.crossref.org/works?query=BRICS%20Journal%20of%20Economics

The first resulting record’s short-container-title value looks like

"short-container-title": [
"brics-econ"
],

That’s not going to be consistent or foolproof though, so you’ll need to evaluate the results to make sure they’re sensible.

5

You didn’t say what you wanted it for, but there have been attempts to define canonical “journal abbreviations”, primarily for the purpose of having compact bibliographies that reference journals by a canonical name. As an example, the Web of Science has their list of abbrevations. That way a title such as “Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik” can be written as “J Reine Angew Math”. There is even an ISO standard that states how individual words should be abbreviated for this purpose, and ISSN.org maintains a standard called LTWA that is based on this. The crossref schema 5.4.0 has abbrev_title for the abbreviated name of the journal. The documentation recommends including periods, but those are not always present in the abbreviated journal-title of structured references. Capitalization is also sometimes different (e.g., Angewandte is not capitalized in the official journal title). There are also sometimes other abbreviations such as “Crelle’s Journal” for Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik. You will often find those alternate journal titles in old literature and this sometimes makes it hard to match a journal title.

It’s unfortunate that almost any issue with metadata has ugly corners when you scratch too hard at it. Identifiers such as DOIs and ISSNs go a long way toward cleaning up the historical messes.

2 Likes
7

Hi Shayn/mccurley,

Thank you so much for you replies.

Thanks,
Perumal N.

1 Like