By "Academic paper database" we mean a database that collects paper metadata such as authors and citations, but not necessarily the full article content.

Academia is so broken that there isn't even one be-all and end-all database of:

all papers by a given author
all citations of a given paper

It's closed access academic journals are evil to the extreme.

ORCID

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Open academic paper database

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By "open" we also mean that you can download their database locally and that it has an open license, not just free access.

TODO evaluate:

www.crossref.org/. No papers by author attempt unless they have ORCID: community.crossref.org/t/get-all-works-of-a-particular-author-without-orcid/3751 so what's the point of this project? www.crossref.org/services/funder-registry/ this Funder registry thing sounds cool though.

PubMed

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pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

This amazing data source contains both:

all papers by author
papers cited by papers

Full database download is described at: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/download/

The only problem with it is scope, being life sciences-only.

The Academic Family Tree

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E.g. list of papers by Isidor Isaac Rabi which includes A New Method of Measuring Nuclear Magnetic Moment.

But unfortunately they don't have paper to paper citations.

neurotree.org/neurotree/faq.php explains that you have to contact an admin to download the database, kind of sad:

How can I export tree data for my own analysis?
Registered users should contact the site administrator (admin at neurotree dot org) for instructions on how to export data from the tree database.

That page also explains how they disambiguate authors with the same name:

How do you identify researchers' publications?
Publications data are drawn from two databases: Medline and Scopus. Because of the large number of researchers with the same name, a disambiguation algorithm is required to accurately link researchers to papers they have authored. We match authors to papers using a two-step process. First, we identify candidate publications based on a simple string match between researcher name and the author list. Second, we look for overlap between co-authors and other individuals in the researcher's mentor network (trainees, mentors, collaborators, etc), and label publications with overlap as high-probability matches. Thus a complete family tree is likely to produce more accurate publication matches.