Release notes

What shipped in each release, newest first. Every tagged version builds the same set of artifacts: archives for Linux, macOS, Windows and FreeBSD, Linux packages (deb, rpm, apk), a multi-arch container image on GHCR, and entries for the package managers. Binaries are pure Go, so there is nothing to install alongside them.

v0.2.0

The first release of spr, and a complete rewrite. Everything below is new.

The binary is called spr now. v0.1.0 shipped a binary called springer and nothing in this release answers to that name. Remove the old one before installing this, because two versions of the same tool under two names on one PATH is a problem that surfaces weeks later in somebody's cron job.

Every response is classified before it is parsed

A 200 from this site means very little on its own. A chapter behind a subscription answers 200 with a full set of metadata and no body, the search surface answers 200 with a 3,038 byte Fastly challenge, and a work that does not exist answers 404 with 122,477 bytes of body. So every response is sorted into ok, restricted, challenged, wrong_kind or not_found on its content, before a byte is parsed, and the classification is carried out to the exit code.

Every field says where it came from

Reading a work is four rungs tried in order, and the record's envelope names which one answered for each field, what was looked for and not found, and what was left unread. A field the page did not carry is absent from the json rather than emitted as null, and a field that should have been there and was stopped is in missed with the reason. A record never looks more complete than it is.

The commands

Twenty of them, flat, with mode flags rather than nested subcommands.

get classifies one url. work, journal, book and series read the four record types. metrics, figures and tables read the subpages. search runs both of the paths this site answers searches on and joins them on DOI. sitemap enumerates the site from its own sitemaps. crossref, openalex and cited-by ask the three hosts this site is not. graph walks from a seed and writes ten formats. api queries the Springer Nature API, which is the one thing here that needs a key. verify, extraction, cache and version explain what the tool is doing and whether the site still reads the way it did.

Nine commands take a list, and read it from stdin

get, work, journal, book, series, metrics, crossref, openalex and cited-by take any number of identifiers, and read them one per line from stdin when none are given. That is what makes the pipelines in these docs real rather than aspirational:

$ spr crossref 10.1007/s10994-021-05946-3 --references | spr work --yes
crossref: 66 of 122 deposited references carry a doi, and 56 do not
spr: 13 of 66 read, 6 restricted, 53 failed

Blank lines and # comments are skipped. More than twenty targets is billed before the first request, with --yes to go ahead. A status becomes the run's exit code only when it covers every target, and a failure part way through does not stop the rest.

The counts are never merged

Springer's metrics page says 1,906 citations attributed to Dimensions, Crossref says 1,553 deposited, and OpenAlex stores 1,563 while its live listing counted 1,554 in the same minute. Every count prints under a name that says who counted it, and no command adds them up. They are counting different corpora and a single number would be a fiction.

The capture ledger

spr verify reads fourteen pages again and reports whether they still yield what they yielded on the day they were measured. Fewer fields fails. More fields also fails, until somebody records the improvement, because an improvement nobody noticed is how a tool ends up with two versions of what it promises. A weekly workflow runs it live and opens one issue rather than turning the build red.

Built and verified

Go 1.26.6, three direct dependencies, 285 tests. Archives for ten platform pairs, deb, rpm and apk, a multi-arch image on GHCR, an SBOM next to every archive, and checksums.txt signed with keyless cosign. See installation for the verify recipe.

v0.1.0

The springer binary: a Crossref member 297 client with recent and search. Superseded entirely by v0.2.0 and left published so its download urls keep working. Nothing in it shares code with what shipped above.