Bibliographic Data Associated with ISSN Registration
The Japanese National Centre for ISSN creates and provides bibliographic data for publications with registered ISSN.
Bibliographic Data Provided via NDL Search
Registered ISSN for publications are made available through bibliographic data in NDL Search.
Please note that:
Tangible publications that are not treated as serials in the NDL (such as monograph series) may lack ISSN in their bibliographic records when no ISSN is displayed in the publications themselves. In such cases, they also cannot be searched by ISSN. This occurs either because the ISSN was omitted from the publication or because the issues were published before an ISSN was assigned.
Bibliographic Data of Online Resources Published in Japan with ISSN
ISSN assigned for domestic online resources, which have been registered and are maintained by the Japanese National Centre for ISSN, can also be searched on the Bibliographic Records of e-Books and e-Periodicals Published in Japan (available in Japanese), by narrowing the search to the database “en_ISSN登録オンラインジャーナル”.
You can also retrieve all bibliographic records of ISSN-registered online resources by using NDL Search API. For details, please refer to 国立国会図書館サーチが提供するOAI-PMH (available in Japanese).
Bibliographic Data Provided Internationally
Outline of the ISSN Portal
The ISSN International Centre holds all the bibliographic data of ISSN in the world in the ISSN International Register (the official registration database for ISSN) and provides them on the web via the ISSN Portal (https://portal.issn.org/) (opens in another window). As of the end of 2025, 2,442,601 ISSN are contained in the ISSN Portal.
After January 2018, essential fields of all the records for ISSN registered as standard numbers can be searched and utilized free of charge.
Bibliographic data with ISSN is Romanized before registration in the ISSN International Centre.
As of January 2021, we have started to register data containing kanji and kana, but please understand that when searching from the ISSN Portal using keywords with kanji or kana will display only search results that contain kanji or kana.
Outline of ROAD
ROAD (Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources) (https://road.issn.org/) (opens in another window) is a service provided by the ISSN International Centre with support from UNESCO. In July 2018, ROAD was integrated into the ISSN Portal.
ROAD provides free access to a subset of ISSN bibliographic records for scholarly resources in open access (online journals, conference proceedings, academic repositories, etc.) which have been registered in the ISSN Portal.
The main purposes of ROAD are as follows:
- To provide a single access point to different types of online scholarly resources published worldwide and freely available.
- To provide information about the quality and prominence of OA resources, indicating by which services they are covered.
- To give an overview of the Open Access scholarly production worldwide (for statistics purposes for instance).
- To demonstrate new ways of using the ISSN for compiling information from various sources.
In March 2015, the Japanese National Centre for ISSN started to send bibliographic data to ROAD. Online journals published in Japan with ISSN which meet all the following requirements are registered:
- FREE content permitting any users to read, download, copy, print or link it
- The entirety of their resources are accessible
- Peer-reviewed academic journal
Frequently Asked Questions
Contact Us
Japanese National Centre for ISSN
Serials and Non-book Materials Division,
Acquisitions and Bibliography Department,
National Diet Library
E-mail: issnjpn