Help & Limits

What you can paste, which styles/exports are supported, and how caching & limits work.

What can I paste?

DOI (e.g. 10.1038/nphys1170 or doi.org URL). Includes a “healer” for minor typos.
PMID / PMCID (PMCID auto-maps to PMID/DOI if available).
ISBN (10/13; dashes/spaces optional). Uses OpenLibrary, falls back to Google Books.
WHO IRIS handles/links.
Free-text lists: we detect, normalize, and dedupe identifiers per line.

Styles & Output

Built-ins: Vancouver, AMA, APA, IEEE. CSL styles: Chicago, MLA, ACS, CSE, and many more. Output can be Text or HTML; HTML can render as footnotes.

Style matrix (short list)

Built-in

Vancouver
AMA
APA
IEEE

CSL (examples)

chicago-author-date
mla
acs-nano
council-of-science-editors

More CSL styles will appear as we expand the gallery.

Export formats

TXT, BibTeX, RIS, CSL JSON, EndNote (Refer/XML), RefWorks, MEDLINE, CSV, Zotero RDF.

Coming soon: BibLaTeX, Pandoc Markdown, CSL YAML.

Speed & caching

Recent lookups are cached so repeats are fast. Very new records may be briefly cached as “not found.” If you suspect a fresh registration, retry after a short delay or append ?nocache=1 in the UI.

Developer note: responses include X-Scholar-Cache with BYPASS or ENABLED.

Rate limits

If you send many requests quickly, you may see 429 Too Many Requests. Back off per the Retry-After header.

For developers

We return X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Reset, and Retry-After.

Buckets differ by route (format, export, stream, etc.). See /api/health for a snapshot.

Errors

Friendly 4xx for input issues (e.g., invalid style/format).
Line-level messages for failed lookups.
Server errors are rare; we track them and improve reliability.

Privacy

We don’t share your input with third parties beyond the resolvers needed to fulfill your request (e.g., Crossref, PubMed). Logs are minimized and scrubbed. See Privacy Policy.