Do not respond with a 500 error message if external APIs are down

[peetucket]

If an API request comes in to search for publications by DOI, PMID or title, we may need to make a third party API call to Web of Science or PMID to service this call. If the 3rd party is down, we would respond with a 500 message to the caller of our API (which is the profiles system).

We should consider changing our response to a 200 with some other response (perhaps empty result set). This requires coordination with the Profiles team to decide how to better handle this scenario.

[jcoyne]

This sounds like a perfect situation for a 503 Service Unavailable

[peetucket]

Yes, that would make more sense, though they would then have to do a better job trapping things on their end too to provide a better user experience. But that is out of our control, and a 503 is more accurate than 500.