specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: Clarivate
providerId: clarivate
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-09-05'
generated: '2026-09-05'
method: searched
source: >-
  The "Throttling Configuration" and "Plans" tables published on the Clarivate
  Developer Portal API detail pages: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-starter,
  https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos, https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-journal,
  https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-researcher, https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/incites
  (all HTTP 200 on 2026-09-05).
description: >-
  Clarivate publishes per-second and per-day request ceilings for the five Web of
  Science / InCites APIs, tied to entitlement plan rather than to a paid tier. It does
  NOT document any rate-limit response header, any 429 behaviour, or any Retry-After
  contract — so an agent can read the number in the docs but gets no runtime signal
  back from the gateway. This file replaces a 2026-05-04 scaffold that asserted
  X-RateLimit-* / RateLimit-Policy headers and 429/503 codes Clarivate has never
  documented.
limit_count: 13
headers:
  documented: false
  note: >-
    No rate-limit response headers are documented anywhere on developer.clarivate.com.
    The published throttle is a docs number only; the API gateway (a Kong-based
    wicked.haufe.io portal) is not documented as emitting X-RateLimit-*, RateLimit-* or
    Retry-After.
responseCodes:
  documented: false
  note: >-
    The status code returned on exhaustion is not published. The documented error table
    for the WoS APIs covers 400, 401, 404, 405 and 50X only — 429 does not appear.
limits:
  - api: Web of Science Starter API
    tier: Free Trial Plan
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 1
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-starter
  - api: Web of Science Starter API
    tier: Free Trial Plan
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 50
    timeFrame: day
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-starter
  - api: Web of Science Starter API
    tier: Free Institutional Member Plan
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 5
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-starter
  - api: Web of Science Starter API
    tier: Free Institutional Member Plan
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 5000
    timeFrame: day
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-starter
  - api: Web of Science Starter API
    tier: Free Institutional Integration Plan
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 5
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-starter
  - api: Web of Science Starter API
    tier: Free Institutional Integration Plan
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_day
    limit: 20000
    timeFrame: day
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-starter
  - api: Web of Science API Expanded
    tier: Basic
    scope: contract
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 2
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos
  - api: Web of Science API Expanded
    tier: Intermediate
    scope: contract
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 2
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos
  - api: Web of Science API Expanded
    tier: Advanced
    scope: contract
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 3
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos
  - api: Web of Science API Expanded
    tier: Premium
    scope: contract
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 5
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos
  - api: Web of Science Journals API
    tier: Journals API Plan
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 5
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-journal
  - api: Web of Science Researcher API
    tier: Researcher API Plan
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 5
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/wos-researcher
  - api: InCites Document Level Metrics API
    tier: Standard InCites Subscription
    scope: api-key
    metric: requests_per_second
    limit: 2
    timeFrame: second
    source: https://developer.clarivate.com/apis/incites
volume_ceilings:
  note: >-
    The Expanded API additionally meters "Full Records" — the record-retrieval volume,
    not the request count — per year (Basic 50,000 / Intermediate 250,000 /
    Advanced 1,000,000 / Premium 3,000,000) and per month on the Essentials packages
    (1,000,000 / 500,000 / 100,000). See plans/clarivate-plans-pricing.yml.
undocumented:
  - >-
    The 21 non-WoS APIs on the developer portal (Cortellis, Derwent Sequence Search,
    IP Data, Converis, EndNote, SUSHI, RIC/LSH) publish no throttle figures at all.
  - >-
    No documented rate-limit headers, no documented 429 body, no documented
    Retry-After. This is the largest agent-readiness gap in Clarivate's runtime
    semantics: a client cannot discover its remaining budget from a response.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com