5 Free Academic APIs Every Developer Should Know (No Key Required)

Last week I shared 5 Free APIs That Changed How I Build Side Projects . It got way more attention than I expected. Several people asked about research and academic APIs — so here are 5 more free APIs, focused on scholarly data. All of them are completely free , require no API key , and return real, verified data (not AI-generated). 1. Crossref — 150M+ Scholarly Articles Crossref is the official DOI registry. Every DOI ever assigned has metadata here. import requests resp = requests . get ( " https://api.crossref.org/works " , params = { " query " : " machine learning " , " rows " : 3 , " mailto " : " you@email.com " # polite pool = 10x faster }) for item in resp . json ()[ " message " ][ " items " ]: print ( f " { item [ ' title ' ][ 0 ] } " ) print ( f " Cited by { item [ ' is-referenced-by-count ' ] } papers " ) Best for: Citation analysis, bibliography generation, DOI resolution Docs: https://api.crossref.org 2. OpenAlex — 250M+ Academic Works The successor to Microsoft Academic Gra