The CitEc project has launched an Application Programming Interface (API) to enable external applications to query the CitEc database and obtain citation data through a simple web interface. It allows to retrieve three different types of data for each document: plain, AMF (Academic Metadata Format) and citedby.
- Plain XML data about cites of a single document. This data should be processed by the API client before be presented to the user.
- AMF metadata for cites and references (if available) for the document. The XML response is an AMF record. More details about the AMF schema is available at: http://amf.openlib.org/doc/ebisu.html.
- Citedby shows the cites for the document. By default, the XML output is transformed through an XSLT style sheet to generate an human readable page.
The CitEc API is addressed mainly to:
- Institutions providing data to RePEc (RePEc archives). The API could be used to insert in their web pages the number of citations of each document.
- Researchers who want to use CitEc data in their bibliometric research. It provides an easy way to get basic data about documents and citations. Note that such researchers also could ask us to provide the data in the customized format they need in order to reduce even more the processing time.
Look at http://citec.repec.org/api.html for more information and examples.
Note that beyond CitEc, IDEAS provides also an API for other parts of the RePEc database.
Enjoy!
Posted by Jose Manuel Barrueco 
The RePEc Blog 