The Kitchin Research Group

I have been slowly working on getting alternative identifiers to the DOI for scientific literature. The DOI is great for getting a bibtex entry, and getting to the article page, but other identifiers, e.g. from Pubmed, Scopus or Web of Science provide links to additional information. Here, I examine an approach to get a Web of Science identifier from a DOI.

In a previous post we showed how to use the Web of Science OpenURL services to derive links to articles from the DOI. It turns out that if you follow that link, you get redirected to a URL that has the WOS Accession number in it. For example, this link: http://ws.isiknowledge.com/cps/openurl/service?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:doi/10.1021/jp047349j is redirected to http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000225079300029&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8703b88d69db6b417a9c0dc510538f44 . You can see the wos:000225079300029 in that URL, so all we need to do is extract it. We use some url functions in emacs lisp to to that. They are a little convoluted, but they work. Previously I used a regular expression to do this.

(cdr (assoc "KeyUT" (url-parse-query-string (url-filename (url-generic-parse-url  "http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000225079300029&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8703b88d69db6b417a9c0dc510538f44")))))

It is a tad tricky to get the redirected URL. We have to use the most basic url-retrieve, which works asynchronously, and we need a callback function to handle the response. I use a trick with global variables to note that the function is waiting, and to sleep briefly until it is ready. We want the last redirect (this seems to get redirected twice).

(defvar *wos-redirect* nil)
(defvar *wos-waiting* nil)

(defun wos-get-wos-redirect (url)
  "Return final redirect url for open-url"
  (setq *wos-waiting* t)
  (url-retrieve
   url
   (lambda (status)
     (setq *wos-redirect* (car (last status)))
     (setq *wos-waiting* nil)))
  (while *wos-waiting* (sleep-for 0.1))
  (url-unhex-string *wos-redirect*))


(defun wos-doi-to-accession-number (doi)
  "Return a WOS Accession number for a DOI."
  (let* ((open-url (concat "http://ws.isiknowledge.com/cps/openurl/service?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:doi/" doi))
         (redirect (wos-get-wos-redirect open-url)))
    (substring  (cadr
                 (assoc
                  "KeyUT"
                  (url-parse-query-string
                   (url-filename
                    (url-generic-parse-url redirect)))))
    4)))

(concat "wos:" (wos-doi-to-accession-number "10.1021/jp047349j"))

wos:000225079300029

I am not super crazy about this approach, but until I figure out the WOK API, this is surprisingly simple! And, now you can use the Accession number in a url like these examples:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/reference/ISI?id=000225079300029

http://ws.isiknowledge.com/cps/openurl/service?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_id=info:ut/000225079300029

That might turn out to be handy at some point.

Copyright (C) 2015 by John Kitchin. See the License for information about copying.

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