The LibKey API is a powerful tool designed for developers to quickly leverage the linking power of LibKey in a variety of applications. This guide is a quick start to get you going and some advice on best practices for implementation, but for additional details we recommend you also look at the Article DOI/PMID Lookup Endpoint Reference Guide as well.
Overview
In short, the interaction between your application and the LibKey API is a RESTful interaction featuring a simple GET request to the API with three key pieces of information:
DOI/PMID (for identifying the article you are interested in learning about)
Library ID (for identifying for which library the links are intended)
API Key (unique to the library ID)
(optional) an “include” statement which allows you to receive journal-level information as well
In return, you get:
Links to the PDF (fullTextFile) and Article Link (contentLocation) if available
OA Status - for defining if the article is OpenAccess. You might use this to display some sort of “open access” icon in your interface, for example.
Article in context link (browzineWebLink) if you would like to provide a link to see the article in its originally published context within the BrowZine interface (all LibKey subscribers have access to BrowZine web as well which is needed for this link to appear/work).
(If using the optional include) Information about the journal including a link to the journal in BrowZine and link to the cover image asset for inclusion in your interface as well as the SJR value of the journal.
Examples
To setup a query, using your API Key use this kind of structure for DOIs:
https://api.thirdiron.com/public/v1/libraries/73/articles/doi/{DOI}?access_token={API_KEY}
… and this kind of structure for PMIDs:
https://api.thirdiron.com/public/v1/libraries/73/articles/pmid/{PMID}?access_token={API_KEY}
These queries will yield similar JSON results like this: