TL;DR Search 130M+ scholarly articles via a single API endpoint, with median latency under 1 second. The Crossref Academic Search API returns DOI, title, authors, journal, publication date, and citation count in one call. Free tier (100 requests/month) — instant signup on RapidAPI, no credit card. If you've ever tried to programmatically resolve a DOI or scrape together citation metadata, you know it's slower than it should be: separate endpoints, slow responses, inconsistent author parsing. The Crossref Academic Search API solves that in a single call powered by Crossref's official DOI registration database. Why citation discovery is harder than it looks The naive approach to academic paper search is to call the Crossref REST API directly. That works, but you'll spend half your weekend handling the edge cases: Author arrays mix given / family / name / suffix fields. Some authors have only one of those.…