Automated retrieval of Journal title, given ISSN

September 28, 2018 8:11 AM

I've got a spreadsheet with a list of several thousand ISSNs. I'd like an automated way to retrieve titles for these ISSNs. Anybody got any bright ideas?

I don't have access to Ulrich's, but I do have Worldcat. Ideally, this could be done by uploading the list to a website, or running a macro withing the spreadsheet.

posted by cosmicbandito to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Look at API documentation for Worldcat. I know that PubMed has an API that can do this for PMIDs. Knowledge of that API saves me a lot of time. All you have do to is append to the start of the identifier, and you are redirected to the journal website containing the resource, which (unfortunately) often needs to be purchased.
posted by metasunday at 8:24 AM on September 28, 2018

Best answer: Most journals are in crossref, and you can use their API really easily. To get journal information based on an ISSN, you just follow this pattern:

https://api.crossref.org/journals/[issn]

example: https://api.crossref.org/journals/1549-7712

API Documentation
posted by rockindata at 10:44 AM on September 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

There are some suggestions to a similar question about Calibre here that may help you automate this more easily.
posted by Mo Nickels at 12:25 PM on September 28, 2018

Best answer: A few suggestions from having just looked into/done this: two reliable, and easy to use, data sources were

- SCOPUS -- example search
- The NLM Catalog -- example search
posted by vert canard at 6:54 AM on October 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Huge shout-out to Vert Canard for making this happen for me. He was able to take a spreadsheet of ISSNs and churn through them very rapidly. He's graciously refused any form of payment, so I'll be kicking some cash over to Cortex to fund Metafilter in his name. Thanks again, Vert!
posted by cosmicbandito at 1:11 PM on October 4, 2018 [3 favorites]