Nature APInature.com ↗
Extract structured bibliographic metadata from Nature.com research articles — authors, DOI, abstract, journal, volume, issue, ISSN, and more.
What is the Nature API?
The Nature.com API exposes 10 bibliographic fields per article through a single endpoint, get_paper_metadata. Given any Nature.com article URL, it returns the paper title, abstract, author list, journal name, DOI, publication year, volume, issue, starting page, and ISSN — everything needed to programmatically catalog or cite a paper without manual data entry.
curl -X GET 'https://api.parse.bot/scraper/b0641b08-de14-412f-9594-2a3e4924d544/get_paper_metadata?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41586-020-2649-2' \ -H 'X-API-Key: $PARSE_API_KEY'
Given a Nature.com article URL, extracts bibliographic metadata including authors, publication year, title, journal name, starting page (SP), volume (VL), issue (IS), abstract, ISSN (SN), and DOI. Makes one HTTP request to the article page and parses embedded citation meta tags.
| Param | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| urlrequired | string | Full URL of a Nature.com article (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2649-2). Must be a nature.com domain. |
{
"type": "object",
"fields": {
"IS": "Issue number",
"SN": "ISSN of the journal",
"SP": "Starting page number",
"VL": "Volume number",
"DOI": "Digital Object Identifier",
"year": "Publication year as integer",
"title": "Paper title",
"authors": "Array of author names in 'Last, First' format",
"journal": "Journal name",
"abstract": "Paper abstract text"
},
"sample": {
"data": {
"IS": "7825",
"SN": "1476-4687",
"SP": "357",
"VL": "585",
"DOI": "10.1038/s41586-020-2649-2",
"year": 2020,
"title": "Array programming with NumPy",
"authors": [
"Harris, Charles R.",
"Millman, K. Jarrod",
"van der Walt, Stéfan J.",
"Gommers, Ralf",
"Virtanen, Pauli",
"Cournapeau, David",
"Wieser, Eric",
"Taylor, Julian",
"Berg, Sebastian",
"Smith, Nathaniel J.",
"Kern, Robert",
"Picus, Matti",
"Hoyer, Stephan",
"van Kerkwijk, Marten H.",
"Brett, Matthew",
"Haldane, Allan",
"del Río, Jaime Fernández",
"Wiebe, Mark",
"Peterson, Pearu",
"Gérard-Marchant, Pierre",
"Sheppard, Kevin",
"Reddy, Tyler",
"Weckesser, Warren",
"Abbasi, Hameer",
"Gohlke, Christoph",
"Oliphant, Travis E."
],
"journal": "Nature",
"abstract": "Array programming provides a powerful, compact and expressive syntax for accessing, manipulating and operating on data in vectors, matrices and higher-dimensional arrays..."
},
"status": "success"
}
}About the Nature API
What the API Returns
The get_paper_metadata endpoint accepts a url parameter — the full URL of any Nature.com article, such as https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2649-2 — and returns a structured record with 10 fields. The authors field is an array of names in Last, First format, suitable for direct use in citation generators or author-affiliation databases. The DOI field provides the canonical Digital Object Identifier, which can be resolved via https://doi.org/ for cross-referencing with other bibliographic systems.
Bibliographic Fields in Detail
Beyond authorship and identity, the response includes journal-level metadata: journal (the publication name), SN (ISSN), VL (volume number), IS (issue number), and SP (starting page). These map directly to standard citation formats such as APA, MLA, and BibTeX. The year field is returned as an integer, not a string, making it straightforward to filter or sort records programmatically. The abstract field contains the full paper abstract as plain text.
Input Requirements and Coverage
The only required input is url. It must point to a Nature.com article page — the endpoint covers articles published across Nature Portfolio journals, which includes Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Climate Change, Scientific Reports, and others hosted on the nature.com domain. URLs pointing to non-article pages (journal homepages, collections, news features) are outside the intended scope.
The Nature API is a managed, monitored endpoint for nature.com — not a raw scraper you maintain. Every endpoint is automatically health-checked on a schedule, and when nature.com changes and a check fails, the API is automatically queued for repair and re-verified. It is built to keep working as the site underneath it changes.
This isn't an official nature.com API — it's an independent, maintained REST wrapper over public data. Where the source has no official API (or only a limited one), Parse gives you a stable contract over a source that never promised one, and keeps it current. Need a new endpoint or field? You can revise it yourself in plain English and the agent rebuilds it against the live site in minutes — contributing the change back to the shared API is free.
Will this API break when the source site changes?+
Is this an official API from the source site?+
Can I fix or extend this API myself if I need a new endpoint or field?+
What happens if I call an endpoint that has an issue?+
- Auto-populate a research database with DOI, authors, and journal metadata by passing article URLs from a reading list
- Build a BibTeX or RIS export tool that maps
VL,IS,SP,SN, andDOIto citation format fields - Aggregate author publication records across Nature Portfolio journals using the
authorsarray - Track publication volume and issue data (
VL,IS) to identify where research in a topic cluster is being published - Cross-reference Nature.com abstracts with PubMed or Semantic Scholar records using the
DOIfield - Populate a lab or institution's internal bibliography tool with structured metadata from assigned reading URLs
| Tier | Price | Credits/month | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 200 | 5 req/min |
| Hobby | $30/mo | 1,000 | 20 req/min |
| Developer | $100/mo | 5,000 | 100 req/min |
| Team | $300/mo | 20,000 | 300 req/min |
| Company | $1,000/mo | 100,000 | 500 req/min |
Each endpoint has a fixed posted price per successful call — most fall between 1 and 10 credits — shown on this API's page before you run it. Exceeding the rate limit returns a 429 response. Authenticate with the X-API-Key header.
Does Nature.com have an official developer API?+
What does `get_paper_metadata` return for the `authors` field?+
Last, First (e.g., ['Smith, Jane', 'Doe, John']). The order reflects the author sequence as listed on the article page. Affiliation, corresponding-author status, and ORCID identifiers are not included in the current response.Does the API return full article text or figures?+
Can I query articles in bulk by journal or keyword rather than individual URLs?+
Are there articles on Nature.com that won't return complete metadata?+
VL, IS, or SP may be absent or null in the response. Research articles with standard DOIs are the most reliably complete.