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dblp-api

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Search computer science publications, authors, and venues via DBLP

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I want to install this Agent Skill for this project in Codex.

Source SKILL.md: https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills/blob/HEAD/skills/43-wentorai-research-plugins/skills/domains/cs/dblp-api/SKILL.md

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DBLP API Guide

Overview

DBLP (Digital Bibliography and Library Project) is the most comprehensive open bibliographic database for computer science. Maintained by Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics, DBLP indexes over 6.5 million publications from thousands of journals, conference proceedings, and informal publication venues in computer science and related fields.

DBLP is widely regarded as the authoritative source for computer science bibliographic data. It is used by researchers for tracking publication records, by hiring committees for evaluating academic productivity, and by bibliometric tools for analyzing the computer science research landscape. Each author in DBLP has a unique profile page with a complete, disambiguated publication list.

The API is entirely free and open, requiring no authentication. There are no published rate limits, though users are expected to be respectful and avoid excessive load on the servers. All data is available under the ODC-BY license.

Authentication

No authentication required. The DBLP API is fully open and free to use. No API key, registration, or email is needed. Users should include a descriptive User-Agent header and avoid sending excessive concurrent requests.

Core Endpoints

Publication Search: Find Computer Science Papers

  • URL: GET https://dblp.org/search/publ/api
  • Parameters:
    ParamTypeRequiredDescription
    qstringYesSearch query (supports author:, venue:, year: prefixes)
    formatstringNoResponse format: json, xml (default: xml)
    hintegerNoNumber of results (default: 30, max: 1000)
    fintegerNoStarting offset for pagination (default: 0)
    cintegerNoMaximum completions in auto-suggest mode
  • Example: 
    curl "https://dblp.org/search/publ/api?q=graph+neural+networks&format=json&h=10&f=0"
  • Response: JSON with result.hits containing @total count and hit array. Each hit has info with title, authors.author, venue, year, type, doi, url, and ee (electronic edition link).

Author Search: Find Researchers

  • URL: GET https://dblp.org/search/author/api
  • Parameters:
    ParamTypeRequiredDescription
    qstringYesAuthor name query
    formatstringNoResponse format: json, xml
    hintegerNoNumber of results (default: 30)
    fintegerNoStarting offset
  • Example: 
    curl "https://dblp.org/search/author/api?q=Yann+LeCun&format=json&h=5"
  • Response: JSON with matched author profiles including author name, url (DBLP profile URL), and optional notes with affiliation information.

Venue Search: Find Journals and Conferences

  • URL: GET https://dblp.org/search/venue/api
  • Parameters:
    ParamTypeRequiredDescription
    qstringYesVenue name query
    formatstringNoResponse format: json, xml
    hintegerNoNumber of results
    fintegerNoStarting offset
  • Example: 
    curl "https://dblp.org/search/venue/api?q=NeurIPS&format=json&h=5"
  • Response: JSON with matched venue names, acronyms, and DBLP venue URLs.

Author Profile: Full Publication List

  • URL: GET https://dblp.org/pid/{pid}.json
  • Parameters:
    ParamTypeRequiredDescription
    pidstringYesDBLP person ID (e.g., h/GeoffreyEHinton) from author search results
  • Example: 
    curl "https://dblp.org/pid/h/GeoffreyEHinton.json"
  • Response: JSON with full author profile including name variants, affiliation, and complete publication list with metadata.

Rate Limits

No published rate limits. DBLP does not enforce strict API quotas. However, the service is provided by a non-profit institution with limited resources. Best practices include limiting requests to a reasonable rate (1-2 per second), using caching for repeated queries, and downloading the DBLP XML dump for large-scale analyses instead of querying the API repeatedly.

Common Patterns

Track an Author's Publication Record

Get a complete, chronological list of publications for a researcher:

# Step 1: Find the author's DBLP PID
curl "https://dblp.org/search/author/api?q=Jure+Leskovec&format=json&h=1"

# Step 2: Fetch their full profile
curl "https://dblp.org/pid/l/JureLeskovec.json"

Find Top Papers at a Conference

Search for publications at a specific venue in a given year:

curl "https://dblp.org/search/publ/api?q=venue:ICML+year:2024&format=json&h=50"

Cross-Reference with DOI

Use DBLP records to find DOIs and link to other metadata sources:

curl "https://dblp.org/search/publ/api?q=attention+is+all+you+need&format=json&h=1" | jq '.result.hits.hit[0].info.doi'

References