Measuring a paper

The smallest possible Project: just a paper, identified by DOI or PubMed ID, with no code repository or package attached. This is the right shape when you’re reporting on a publication itself rather than a specific tool.

Repository scholarly mentions are a separate measurement. Add a repository identity with --repo when you want OpenAlex and Europe PMC to search for the repository as well; a DOI-only Project’s Attention rows describe the paper, not its code repository.

boast about 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002195

Output — Citations and Attention Metrics only. Code and Downloads have nothing to attach to without a repository or package, so they’re omitted entirely rather than shown as zero (see ADR-0002; the full transcript, including what a Code/Downloads section looks like once a repo and package are added, is in Getting started):

boast 0.1.1 — as of 2026-08-03T05:43:11Z

━━ doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002195 ━━
"Big Data: Astronomical or Genomical?" — Zachary D. Stephens et al., PLOS Biology, 2015
── Citations ──
  citations              1426  all-time                 openalex
  ...

A bare PubMed ID works the same way:

boast about pmid:26151137

Same paper, different identifier — but not quite the same output. A few Providers (Crossref, Dimensions) only look papers up by DOI, so a PMID-only Project sees fewer of them than a DOI one does:

boast 0.1.1 — as of 2026-08-03T05:46:47Z

━━ pmid:26151137 ━━
── Citations ──
  citations             1426  all-time  openalex
  fwci                 59.95  all-time  openalex  field-weighted citation impact; 1.0 = world average
  citation_percentile  99.96  all-time  openalex  top 1% in its field, year, and type
  citations              581  all-time  europe_pmc  citation count from Europe PMC

Each run already writes a Snapshot to snapshots/ (pass --no-save to only print). See Diffing the history to compare one Snapshot against a later run.