[HN Gopher] Show HN: Turn a paper's DOI into its full reference ...
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       Show HN: Turn a paper's DOI into its full reference list
       (BibTeX/RIS, etc.)
        
       Author : mireklzicar
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2025-06-22 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (references.mireklzicar.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (references.mireklzicar.com)
        
       | oersted wrote:
       | Is an open-source library being used for this? Or can you
       | describe the methods you use? I worked on this and related
       | problems around extracting features from paper PDFs, we could all
       | learn from how you did it.
       | 
       | Generally, an About page is always appreciated for such web tools
       | with minimal UX, particularly when it's rather automagical.
        
         | trurl42 wrote:
         | Looks like it's just calling the crossref API
        
           | afandian wrote:
           | You can look at the network requests to see what it's doing.
           | It's querying the OpenCitations database followed by the
           | DOI.org content negotiation endpoint, which 302's to Crossref
           | (or whoever the relevant DOI registration agency is).
           | 
           | More info on content negotiation:
           | 
           | https://citation.doi.org/
        
         | afandian wrote:
         | In this case it's querying the relevant DOI registration
         | agency's API for the metadata (statistically that's likely
         | Crossref) that the publisher themselves registered. So it
         | doesn't look like there's any extraction going on here.
         | 
         | Could you share _your_ work though? It's always interesting to
         | see new approaches to metadata.
         | 
         | Traditionally, it was a bit of a one-way street (data comes
         | from publisher) but there's some interesting work being done by
         | COMET [0] and (separately) OpenAlex [1] around cleanup of the
         | publisher-supplied data within the community.
         | 
         | (I used to work at Crossref; am a little involved with COMET)
         | 
         | [0] https://www.cometadata.org/
         | 
         | [1] https://openalex.org/
        
         | mireklzicar wrote:
         | Its actually open-source. Here is the repo:
         | https://github.com/mireklzicar/doi-reference-extractor
         | 
         | APIs Used OpenCitations API (v2)
         | 
         | Endpoint: https://opencitations.net/index/api/v2/references/
         | Purpose: Retrieves a list of all references from a paper by its
         | DOI Data format: JSON containing cited DOIs and metadata DOI
         | Content Negotiation
         | 
         | Endpoint: https://doi.org/{DOI} Purpose: Fetches metadata and
         | formatted citations for DOIs Formats: BibTeX, RIS, CSL JSON,
         | RDF XML, etc. Implements CSL (Citation Style Language) for
         | text-based citations Local Citation Style Files
         | 
         | Purpose: Provides access to thousands of citation styles
         | Storage: Pre-generated JSON files with style information
        
       | avoutos wrote:
       | This tool might be useful for quick one-off referencing, but I
       | feel that most will probably be better off using a proper
       | citation manager like the open-source Zotero.
        
         | mireklzicar wrote:
         | Keep Zotero/Mendeley for collection management; use this simple
         | tool when you just need the formatted references list in five
         | seconds.
         | 
         | Where it helps
         | 
         | - Deep-dive reading - fetch bulk RIS file and dump a seminal
         | paper's entire bibliography into Zotero/Mendeley and follow the
         | threads.
         | 
         | - Bulk citing - grab BibTeX's for a cluster of related papers
         | without hunting them down one-by-one.
         | 
         | - LLM grounding - feed language models a clean reference list
         | so they stop hallucinating citations.
        
           | foundry27 wrote:
           | Did you just use a LLM to write this reply?
        
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       (page generated 2025-06-22 23:00 UTC)