World Bank
The World Bank publishes the World Development Indicators, a set of yearly cross-country statistics on economy, population, health, education and environment. Through ScholarMuse, an agent can search those indicators by name with find_series and fetch one indicator for one country, region or income group with get_series.
ScholarMuse tools: find_series, get_series. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from World Bank.
find_series
Matches come from indicator names. When the query names a country, the seriesId already carries ?country=ISO3.
- seriesId
- e.g. world-bank:NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?country=CHN
- title
- Indicator name
- frequency
- Always Annual for this source
- units
- Unit read from the indicator name
- geography
- Country named in the query, if any
- description
- World Bank source note, first 400 characters
- originalSource
- Organisation the World Bank took the data from
get_series
- seriesId
- Indicator id with the resolved country code
- title
- Indicator name
- units
- Unit read from the indicator name
- frequency
- Annual
- geography
- Country or aggregate name from the World Bank
- lastUpdated
- Date the World Bank last updated the data
- start
- First year returned
- end
- Last year returned
- count
- Number of observations returned
- observations
- List of year and value pairs
What it covers
- Search covers the World Development Indicators database only (source 2 in the World Bank API).
- Geography is one country, or a World Bank aggregate such as World, Euro area, European Union or an income group, given by ISO code or name.
- Series are yearly. Typical ids look like NY.GDP.PCAP.CD (GDP per capita), SP.POP.TOTL (population) or SP.DYN.LE00.IN (life expectancy).
Limits
- One indicator and one country or aggregate per call. If no country is given, the World aggregate is returned.
- Search matches English indicator names, not descriptions, and keeps only indicators that contain at least half of the query words.
- At most 8 World Bank candidates per find_series call, and years with no value are left out of the result.
How ScholarMuse reaches World Bank
The connector calls the World Bank Indicators API v2 directly and sends no key. The API has no text search, so ScholarMuse downloads the list of World Development Indicators and matches your query against indicator names; values come from /country/{code}/indicator/{id}.
Values are cached for up to 1 day, the indicator list for 7 days and the country list for 30 days, so a new World Bank release can take that long to appear.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: CC-BY-4.0
Data from the World Bank, World Development Indicators (data.worldbank.org), CC BY 4.0.
Records that come from World Bank carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow World Bank's own citation guidance.
