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Releases and citations

Every January NEON publishes an immutable release with a DOI for each data product; six exist as of September 2026 (RELEASE-2021 … RELEASE-2026)1. Tools: neon_list_releases, neon_get_release and neon_get_citation.

Releases

neon_list_releases returns every release newest first with its generation date, product count and manifest artifacts (signed manifest URLs only with include_artifact_urls). neon_get_release takes a tag, a release UUID or latest and returns its products with DOIs (paged, filterable with product_query); include adds sites (codes and names) and artifacts. product_code or site_code return that product or site exactly as published in the release.

An unknown tag fails with not_found and validReleases.

Why the release site and product lists are never fetched

NEON's /releases/{tag}/sites and /releases/{tag}/products return 22 MB and 26 MB. neon-mcp builds the release site list from a codes-only GraphQL query instead and never calls those endpoints.

Citations

neon_get_citation renders NEON's recommended wording2 with the DOI of the newest release that has one (or the release you name), plus a BibTeX entry:

NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network). Breeding landbird point counts (DP1.10003.001), RELEASE-2026. https://doi.org/10.48443/v6hs-mx57. Dataset accessed from https://data.neonscience.org on September 10, 2026.
  • provisional=true produces the provisional form (no DOI; archive what you used).
  • prototype_uuid cites a prototype dataset by its own DOI and version.
  • The DOI is cross-checked against the release record; a mismatch is reported in notes.
  • The templates live in the neon://guide/citing-neon-data resource and Citing NEON data.

  1. NEON Data API — Releases endpoint. https://data.neonscience.org/data-api/endpoints/releases/ ↩

  2. NEON — Data Policies and Citation Guidelines. https://www.neonscience.org/data-samples/data-policies-citation ↩