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I would add my vote for this feature. Recommendation engines for academic articles
would work a lot better with an easy to access citation database. 

++ for this, Anders points are all great

I add my vote to this

You certainly have my vote on that one too! 

Please do!

I strongly support this one!

yes please

I beg of you!

I also vote for this one.

+1 for this feature

Ditto.

+1

agree, would open up some new opportunities

please include wrapper for .Net c# if possible

Ditto. 

Yes please!

+1

+1
+.Net C# wrapper

I strongly support this one!-2

I would find this most useful being a University student.

another vote

+1

From this information it would be possible to create a desktop application visualising the relationships between 
papers and enabling that information to be navigated dynamically. Something similar to Web of Science's maps of 
paper references but less cumbersome. This would be beneficial to researchers like myself, making it easier to 
keep up with the latest research.

Anyway, this request gets my vote.

I would also make use of a Google Scholar API.

YES!

Another vote

+1

+1

Hey guys --

This is a really interesting suggestion.  Could some of you elaborate on the use cases for a Scholar API?  What 
kinds of applications would you make with it?  The more the better :)

Thanks,
Ben Lisbakken

Another vote from me.

Applications - the obvious one would be integration with Google Docs, allowing
citations to be inserted and a bibliography to be formatted.

@ben - we have a related friendfeed discussion on this

http://friendfeed.com/e/e50430e2-9304-4022-a035-fb83f966f830/How-would-you-use-a-Google-Scholar-API/

Yes please!

Re: use cases - I'm sure many scholars would like to be able to automatically import
citation metrics (# citations, what those citations are) for a given doi.

+1 to this...

Use cases: 
* Ego-searching.  How many times have my articles been cited (lets face it, we all
want to know this in real time :) )

* Universal reference format translator.  EG, I have a list of references (1..N) in
APA...reformat it for me into IEEE.  Even better, I'm resubmitting a paper to a
different journal that requires a different reference format.  The API would take the
entire paper as input, and translate citations and references into the new format

* +1 to integrating with GDocs.  We use GDocs quite a bit to write collaborative
papers in my lab. 


Applications
* I'm writing a research lab intranet type social media site.  I wanted to add the
ability to post citations/articles read, tagging, commenting, bookmarking, etc.  One
challenge I had was how to link to the article...how to deal with DOI's, access
rights, etc.  An GScholar API would be one solutions...effectively outsourcing all
the access issues to Google (at the cost of an extra click for my users, but if it
takes them right to the article they want, fine.)

* I could also imagine a firefox plugin that scans a page for citation information
(via regex, or some embedded semantics) and automagically links it to GScholar.

* This should also play nicely with Zotero (http://www.zotero.org), espeically as
they are coming out with a server sync version.  I imagine they would be a major
player, and would really make open-citation-software to the next level.

+1 for an API!

I'm programming for an ejournal, and it would be a plus for readers and authors to
get the number of citations as well as the citating sources for each article.

+1 for APIs.

Uses?
1. Citation counting is one
2. Another would be integration with a library ("see references that cite this book")
3. Bibliometric citation studies, i.e. research on academia (such as cliques of
scientists)

+1 for reference list (backward citation tracing)
Note that the paid journal databases (like Wiley) now are allowing you to look at the
references in an article and then bring up any of the cited articles. So the forward
citations is fun but it's really helpful to be able to go backwards.

Another vote for a Google Scholar API

This would be a super-cool API; I'm sure the academic community would create lots of
interesting and creative apps with this.

This would be an excellent gift for scientic community. Please consider adding
Scholar API ASAP.

Re: use cases- cf. EndNote, BibDesk, Papers, etc. etc. etc.- currently, any citation
management program that wants to import data from Google Scholar must do so via
screen-scraping. The developers of these apps would have much easier lives if there
was a formal Google Scholar API.

A google scholar API would be tremendous.
Some potential benefits/use cases:

1)  adding cited-by links to a variety of services: online journals, institutional
repositories, individual researcher sites.
2)  cited-by links to GS will provide a valuable, complementary and free alternative
to the existing commercial services (Scopus, Web of Science)
3)  the current primary indicator of 'article impact' is the name of the journal in
which the article is published.  Freely accessible cited-by metrics (along with other
article metrics) will provide a valuable alternative indicator of 'impact' at the
individual article level (useful for funders, institutions, researchers etc).
4)  calculations based on GS citation metrics could provide alternative approaches to
journal impact measures

I think the most important usecases have been covered by others. But just to recap,
my personal motivations for asking were

1) Live citation count (and cited by lists) on publication lists.
2) Live "cited by" lists in my favorite open access journals (eg. PLoS Comp Biol) -
where the "this content is actually available to everyone" info also would be great.
3) Better ways to lookup bibliographic information for apps like Mendeley and
Paperbox ( http://live.gnome.org/PaperBox )

Best
Anders

Just a note- in order for any kind of "live citation count" to be meaningful, we'd
need to know a lot more about how Google Scholar extracts and calculates citation
information. The ISI citation count is generated using a known methodology; as far as
I know, the details of Google Scholar's methodology is known only to Googlers.

Well, when I do a search on Google Scholar, I see the link "Cited by X" next to the
results, and if I click on it I am taken to a page with X links, right? I think that
is good enough for me, if I could get that information in a nice API.

+1 It would be great to have this API and if support for GWT is given that would be
excellent. Thanks for all the great work.

I'm building a Facebook app that allows researchers to collect, annotate, and share their documents (dtext2.org).  
The Amazon Web Services API offers lots of useful metadata on books, but a Google Scholar API would be 
excellent for getting metrics and metadata on scholarly sources.  

API would return:
- title
- authors, affiliations
- source (conference, collection)
- pages
- citations (cited by)
- url

I am also building an inter-lab collaboration site and would find this incredibly useful.

I vote yes.  It would be awesome!!!  What's the hold up?

Specifically, I think 'cited by' would be particularly useful.

From a library developers point of view it would be great if we could integrate
google scholar results into our own systems.

+.Net C# wrapper

+1. This would be a really useful feature for any bibligraphic management or
recommender tools.

An app to generate a 'tree of knowledge'. The app identifies parent documents that
have been cited by x of your current biblio's documents. As these are defined, the
app then suggests 'sibling' documents that also cite these parent documents. This
will quickly generate multiple generations of citation, and the user qualifies
suggested documents, maintaining or increasing the focus of the suggestions.

By using cross-citation and correlation of one-way ('upstream') citation to parent
works, the app could model the literature of a given topic in an organic way. That
would be sweet. That might be a little beyond the function of the same app though.

+1.  Publish or Perish (PoP) (http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm) is the most innovative
use of Google Scholar I've seen.  It automates computing author's citation metrics to
measure their scientific output.  

Adding facility for disambiguation of authors would be tremendously valuable, so you
could determine that "Smith, J." in this context refers to same author mentioned as
"Smith, John" and not "Smith, James".  PoP lets you select checkboxes next to each
paper to assist with this disambiguation but its time-consuming and error-prone.  I'm
not sure what the solution would look like (maybe an OpenID validation of authors or
possibly the disambiguation could be community moderated?) The most obvious
improvement would be to profile the topics and subject domains each author publishes
on (and the journals they've appeared in, and the co-authorship of the papers) and
determine that author "Smith, J." who writes on topic X is likely to be "Smith, John"
and not "Smith, James" who writes on vastly different topic Y.  

These are some ideas I've deliberated while working on an R&D project for the
Department of Energy that attempts to bring scientific credibility to the blogosphere
- http://wiki.milcord.com/wiki/Personalized_Web_2.0_Service_for_Authoritative_Content

Let's hope something comes of this thread.  

+1. It will be great if google scholar api is available!

+1 but for those who can't wait, building a mashup from 
- http://www.programmableweb.com/apitag/science
- http://www.programmableweb.com/apitag/education
- http://www.programmableweb.com/apitag/research
- http://isbndb.com/docs/api/index.html
could do the trick, Im still trying to monitor publisher and journals API (and not
just RSS feeds) but it seems to be taking a while for them to get the idea. Maybe
they are still into information locks...

I am submitting a grant application to the National Library of Medicine for a search
engine for health sciences. API to Google Scholar would help immensely so I could
grab citation frequencies for articles based on their PubMed identifier (PMID) or
digital object identifier (DOI).

+1. Another nice feature would be to get a citation count by the title of a article.

+1. Use-case: A Google Scholar API would enable web-based visualizations of academic
ontologies. A very good application already exists for this: <a
href="http://papercube.peterbergstrom.com/">PaperCube<a>. Unfortunately, it is using
CiteSeer, which provides a suboptimal data set. With a Google Scholar API back-end to
feed the PaperCube front-end, we would have an extraordinarily valuable resource for
performing scientific research.

Please Please make Google Scholar API an Open Source :)

I vote for this also.  I manage a couple of sites where lecturers can enter
information about books or papers that students can read for their courses.  Ideally
it should be as easy as possible for the lecturer to specify the resource that they
are interested in, and then the system should generate links to embed in the pages
shown to students.  Those links should refer unambiguously to the right resource, and
they should make it as easy as possible for the students to access that resource,
either by buying a copy, finding it in a library, or reading it online.  I can do a
good job of this for books with the book search API.  A Google Scholar API would make
it easier for me to do the same with papers.

I could really use this. I would in fact use it in a way that would deliver people to
Google Scholar pages. 

When I have a known citation in my system, I'd like to look it up in Google Scholar
and find out how many 'cited by' hits G.Scholar has. If non-0, I would provide a link
to the 'cited by' listing for that original citation -- a link to the original page
on Google Scholar. 

I would be sending users to Google Scholar who might not ordinarily be using it. 

This would be a very helpful extension of the API!

I would certainly vote for a Google Scholar API.  Academics rely on citation numbers
to guide them through the web of academic papers.  I personally would like to see
some application that would color code citations in papers so when looking through
the list of references one would get an immediate impression of which were the most
authoritative papers being cited.  I've started work on something like this using a
Google Scholar screen scraping approach:
http://linklens.blogspot.com/2009/04/citation-coloring-with-google-scholar.html I'm
getting citation info out based on titles. A google scholar API would make this the
scholar lookup component much cleaner and more reliable.

Thing I'm struggling with now is how to reliably grab all the titles from a reference
list using regex ...

This would be a great feature. Please do add this asap.

Found an example of a script that would benefit from a Google Scholar API:

http://www.plutosforge.com/blog/projects/ncbi-scholar

It adds number of google citations to references returned by PubMed - would love to
see this available for all referencing systems.

Have an example of a system based on a Google Scholar API:

http://linklens.blogspot.com/2009/04/citation-parsing-regular-expression.html

Works via screen scraping at present - colorizes references by citation number so
it's easy to see which are the key papers being referenced.  Interface is web based -
idea is that you copy reference list from PDF doc and paste into web interface - hit
a button and returns the list colorized and linked to Google scholar ...

You have my vote either. And the suggestion for a quick fix is..

Please add "scholar" to the AJAX search like below:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/scholar

+1 Would like to see an API to search scholar based on terms or art discussed in 
academic papers

I think this API will bring alot info for education.

Yes, please!  Or at least provide a way for us legitimate users to avoid getting 302
errors because Scholar thinks we are bots.

Just a note - as well as adding your support in a comment, please click the star
button to receive updates on this thread - apparently Google places a lot of stock in
the number of people "starring" an issue

many people are waiting for the google scholar api¡¡ i would be great¡¡

Another same request .....
google team plllllzzzzz listen to this :)

With such an API, individual researchers could:
- download citations in bibtex format for inclusion in their own paper's citation lists.
- link to or embed google scholar results for their own publications on their personal websites.
- provide links to papers which cited their own publications.
- compute h-indices and other measures of scientific impact.

If the papers listed have permanent URLs or other unique identifiers attached, this could be of use for services where people 
comment on papers, such as online journal clubs, possibly engaging authors.

This is more far-fetched, but if the API includes emails of authors, measures of authoritativeness such as the h-index (even if 
they can be rightfully criticized), could be the basis for increased trust of a user logged onto a service using the same email as 
in publications. Imagine knowledge repositories like wikipedia or user-generated content aggregators like reddit or slashdot 
giving more trust/karma to authenticated scientists: content quality could improve dramatically. Pushing this a little more, it 
would almost be possible to have decentralized peer-review systems based on authenticated authors: let authenticated authors 
endorse a paper, or endorse it conditioned on some requested additions to the paper.

It has not technical obstacles prevent this from being done.

Google Team please provide us with the API.

Google likely cannot provide a Google Scholar API.

The way Google obtains the "Cited by" links in Scholar is through it's free access to 
"deep web" accounts at all major online journal publishers which allow it to 
download, index and analyze the full text PDFs.

Google's contracts with these publishers likely prohibit Google from making an API 
available. I believe this is also why they do not show the opposite of "Cited by" and 
list all the other papers a paper cites.

Basically what I want to do is create a more "multi-dimensional" result for a given
search.  I see that 122 papers have cited a particular hit, and that's interesting,
but I have to go look at all of those papers manually before I learn that two thirds
of them cite the paper for reasons I'm not interested in (as an example, they use a
method developed in the paper, whereas I'm interested in papers that extend the
actual research question).  Ideally, I'd like to be able to get all of the abstracts,
and then give them to a simple NLP engine that will automatically tell me which ones
are moving in the direction I want (but of course, there's no simple way to do that
with the current interface).

Someone else mentioned that citations could be used as links in a graph
representation of the reference network.  I'd like to create an app that collects the
connections (perhaps filtered as above) as something like "pubmed_id cites
pubmed_id", which could then be directly displayed in a graph visualization tool like
cytoscape (http://www.cytoscape.org).  I could then pull out keywords, authors, or
other attributes, and load them directly into cytoscape so the graph could be colored
or searched by attribute.  The abstracts could also be linked directly from the
cytoscape interface.

This seems like it would be an incredibly powerful way to visually explore a body of
literature on a particular topic, and I'm not aware of anything else that gets to
this level.

As a librarian interested in citations API, I vote for this feature

I vote for this..
I'm using googles api for a software develop of retrieving papers and cites from a 
specific paper, using inteligent agents. 

I't woul be a social and distribuited tool for finding and retrievin only scholara an 
education papers. Of course following, free for all.

Please don't last too much...
Many people are waiting for this great service!!!
Thanks in advance!!!!

I could use this for my work in analyzing citation networks...

+1 needed for citation networks work.

This might be very useful for  academic collaboration via Wave - writing an project as a wave, submitting it to the 
teacher who can follow embedded citations et cetera (and then comment).

+1 for research purposes (ideally with public specs on what is included in the citation count!)

Wow, this feature would be great! +1

Aye. +1

+++

This would be a great feature. ++

Please do!

Yes please! 

One more vote from me!

As a PhD student, I find myself performing lots of manual searches on Google Scholar. I 
started building a screen scraper to automate the process but then decided not to 
because any UI change could break it. An API would be great!

Also, we don't need anything fancy. I would guess someone could whip an adequate 
solution together in a few days or weeks.

Or you could make it some kind of a competition and let us solve it.

ditto

yep

Please do!!

Yes please!

That would be very useful.

good idea...but please, do much more 

This would be a great addition to the range of services Google offers.

Would have been lost without google scholar for my undergrad. any enhancements would
be great!

Sounds like a good idea. Would be great if you could make an equivalent tool to 
IPVision's patent mapping for paper mapping.

A Google Scholar API would be fantastic (and I was a little surprised when I began
searching for it to discover it didn't already exist).

Comment 80 from "reflection" suggests that it will be unlikely for Google to be able
to offer an API based on their contracts with commercial publishers. But a number of
vendors are offering pre-indexed searching to universities over such commercial
content. (See e.g. Western Michigan's Summon instance -
http://wmich.summon.serialssolutions.com). 

I would like a Google API to be able to offer a free alternative to these products
within open source next generation library catalogues like VUFind and Blacklight.

more one

We really need this! Please do.

It would be great! Do it.

I would make use of that.

I'd definitely use it!

I want to search text from a PDF in Google Scholar and import the returned bibtex
citation into Jabref. I want a jabref plugin to do all this, so I need an API. Please
Google!

Google Scholar is great. Let's make it better!

++ to this request. Come on guys! You can make it happen... 

Our company publishes a couple journals that are indexed in Google Scholar, but we'd
love to be able to integrate a customized search engine using an API with other
journals as well - please add an API!

I concur heartily!  please add an API!

Utilization of a Scholar API, would be a great tool for research publishers such as
myself. 

I am also voting for this. Google API would  be a great way to build applications
exposing a more complete picture of research in particular areas.

yes please!

This api would be useful. I'm interested in one for asp.net and java. Also, it would be 
helpful to provide an api for a citation manager where it would collect citation data 
and format it relative to either apa (or other style guides) format.

Without this API we are limited to going elsewhere (JStor, Elsevier, etc...) rather than google for this information.

Has this not happened yet?  

Google Scholar API  --- P L E A S E

This would be tremendously useful to me. I work in a non-profit setting and could
very much use an alternative to ISI.

Google Scholar API upupup

In the course of my work as the Digital Repository Librarian at North Carolina State
University I manage the NCSU Scholarly Publications Repository [1], a database of
more than 42,000 publications authored by NC State faculty and staff.

Displaying Cited By data increases both the utility of our repository and facilitates
access to related scholarship.  I've been collecting Cited By data from Thompson
Reuters via the ISI/Web of Science TR-Links web service [2]. That data isn't public
yet, but a preview can be seen at http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jjtuttle/spr-wos/spr-wos.html
 I'm also in negotiations with Scopus to display data using their web service [3].  

Ideally, I'd like to display Google Scholar Cited By data, too.  This would make it
easier for faculty to gather data for retention and promotion, as well as so-called
'vanity searching'.  By displaying Cited By data from multiple sources it makes it
clearer that one index doesn't accurately represent their impact on the scholarly
community.  Displaying data together would likely drive traffic to all three sites,
in my estimation.

Please provide a GS API.

Thanks,
Jim

1. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/repository/scholpubs/search.php
2. http://wokinfo.com/products_tools/products/related/trlinks/
3. http://searchapidocs.scopus.com/

I would use the API to create a "how good is your research paper topic" app where I
would assign a value to both quantity and quality of search results to rate any
potential topic on a 1-10 scale to indicate how "viable" the topic is for a research
paper.  Not too narrrow, not too broad.  An API would be "just right!"

Google Scholar API would be a great tool.

PLEASE include an API to google scholar, particularly the legal opinions.

No brainer to add this. But if they add this ISI web of science and Scopus will be
very afraid indeed.

Please provide the link from where i can get the Google Scholar API

+ 1 vote!