# Elsevier

> Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company (a RELX business) whose Research Products APIs
> expose Scopus, ScienceDirect, SciVal, Embase, Engineering Village and COUNTER usage reporting
> over one host, https://api.elsevier.com. All access is by API key plus an institutional
> entitlement: the key identifies your application, and your institution's subscription decides
> what comes back.

Generated by API Evangelist on 2026-09-06 from Elsevier's own published contracts and
documentation. Elsevier does not publish an llms.txt of its own — /llms.txt returns 404 on
dev.elsevier.com, api.elsevier.com and www.elsevier.com. Note that dev.elsevier.com/robots.txt
Disallows GPTBot, ChatGPT-User and Google-Extended, and every api.elsevier.com response carries
a `tdm-reservation: 1` header.

## Base URL

- https://api.elsevier.com — every product, every operation

## Authentication

- `X-ELS-APIKey: <key>` on every request (register at https://dev.elsevier.com/apikey/manage)
- Entitlement is resolved from your institutional IP address. A valid key called from outside
  the subscribing network returns 401/403 even though the key is fine.
- `X-ELS-Authtoken` — from GET /authenticate?platform=SCOPUS, expires two hours after issue
- `X-ELS-Insttoken` — an Institutional Token for remote access, issued by Elsevier on request
- Elsevier also documents the key as an `apiKey` query parameter. Do not use it; it puts a
  credential in logs, history and referrers.
- Elsevier runs a real OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect authorization server at
  https://id.elsevier.com (discovery at /.well-known/openid-configuration and
  /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server, both HTTP 200 anonymously, probed 2026-09-06). It
  is the identity provider behind the developer-portal sign-in. NONE of its 35 advertised
  scopes governs a Research Products API operation, api.elsevier.com serves no
  oauth-protected-resource document (404), and no page on dev.elsevier.com names the server.
  Do not treat it as an authorization model for the content APIs.

## Contracts

- [WADL contracts (37, the complete surface)](https://api.elsevier.com/documentation/) — the machine-readable XML lives on the API host; the dev-portal links of the same name serve an HTML rendering instead
- [Swagger 2.0: Search](https://dev.elsevier.com/elsdoc/search)
- [Swagger 2.0: Retrieval](https://dev.elsevier.com/elsdoc/retrieval)
- [Swagger 2.0: Metadata](https://dev.elsevier.com/elsdoc/metadata)
- [Swagger 2.0: Scopus](https://dev.elsevier.com/elsdoc/scopus)
- [Swagger 2.0: ScienceDirect](https://dev.elsevier.com/elsdoc/sciencedirect)
- [Swagger 2.0: SciVal](https://dev.elsevier.com/elsdoc/scival)
- [Swagger 2.0: Engineering Village](https://dev.elsevier.com/elsdoc/engineeringvillage)

## Products and their surfaces

- [Scopus APIs](https://dev.elsevier.com/sc_apis.html) — search, abstract/author/affiliation retrieval, citation counts and overviews, serial title
- [ScienceDirect APIs](https://dev.elsevier.com/sd_apis.html) — Search V2, article retrieval and metadata, object retrieval, entitlement, nonserial title
- [SciVal APIs](https://dev.elsevier.com/scival_apis.html) — research-performance metrics for authors, institutions, countries, topics, sources; base /analytics/scival
- [Engineering Village APIs](https://dev.elsevier.com/ev_apis.html) — engineering literature search and retrieval
- [Embase APIs](https://dev.elsevier.com/embase_apis.html) — biomedical and pharmacological indexing
- [SUSHI COUNTER COP5](https://dev.elsevier.com/sushicop5.html) — COUNTER R5 and R5.1 usage reports at /sushi/ and /sushi/r51/

## Documentation

- [Developer portal](https://dev.elsevier.com/)
- [API specification index](https://dev.elsevier.com/api_docs.html)
- [How-to guides](https://dev.elsevier.com/technical_documentation.html)
- [API authentication guide](https://dev.elsevier.com/tecdoc_api_authentication.html)
- [OpenID Connect discovery (identity platform)](https://id.elsevier.com/.well-known/openid-configuration)
- [Interactive APIs (Swagger consoles, no key required)](https://dev.elsevier.com/interactive.html)
- [Examples](https://dev.elsevier.com/examples.html)
- [Support FAQ](https://dev.elsevier.com/support.html)

## Limits

- [Default API key settings](https://dev.elsevier.com/api_key_settings.html) — per-API weekly
  quotas and per-second throttles. Quotas are per API, not per key: 20,000/week for Scopus
  Search, 5,000/week for Author Search, 50,000/week for ScienceDirect Article Retrieval.
- Quotas reset every seven days. Read `X-RateLimit-Limit`, `X-RateLimit-Remaining` and
  `X-RateLimit-Reset` (a Unix timestamp). When the weekly quota is exhausted the first two stop
  being returned and `X-ELS-Status: QUOTA_EXCEEDED` appears instead.
- Exhaustion and throttling both return HTTP 429. There is no `Retry-After`.
- Eight APIs are access-controlled and not enabled on a new key: Scopus Citation Overview,
  Scopus Author Feedback, ScienceDirect Full-Text Entitlement, ScienceDirect Article Hosting
  Permissions, ScienceDirect Holdings Report, Embase, Engineering Village, SUSHI COP5.

## Policy

- [Use cases](https://dev.elsevier.com/use_cases.html) and [use policies](https://dev.elsevier.com/policy.html) — permitted uses are enumerated; anything not listed must be cleared with Elsevier first
- [Text and data mining provisions](https://dev.elsevier.com/tdm_service.html)
- [API service agreement](https://dev.elsevier.com/api_service_agreement.html)
- [TDM reservation](https://www.elsevier.com/.well-known/tdmrep.json) and its [ODRL policy](https://www.elsevier.com/tdm/tdmrep-policy.json)
- [Privacy policy](https://www.elsevier.com/legal/privacy-policy)
- [Security and compliance](https://www.elsevier.com/security)

## SDKs

- [elsapy (Python)](https://pypi.org/project/elsapy/) — version 0.5.1, published 2022-11-09.
  First-party, but Elsevier's own support page says "this SDK is not supported by Elsevier",
  and its GitHub repository is archived. There is no JavaScript, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Go or
  Rust client from Elsevier.

## Optional

- [Release notes](https://dev.elsevier.com/release_notes.html) — 93 dated entries, the newest
  from 2019-09-12. There is no current changelog and no status page.
- [Contact / support centre](https://service.elsevier.com/app/contact/supporthub/researchproductsapis/) — the single channel for quota increases, access-controlled API enablement, Institutional Tokens and commercial licensing