Crossref Scraper

Search 180 million scholarly works, or look papers up by DOI, and get clean metadata: authors, abstracts, citations, funders and full-text links.

Crossref is the registry behind most DOIs: journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, preprints, dissertations and datasets from more than 20,000 publishers. This Actor searches it by keyword, author or journal, or looks works up by DOI, and returns one clean row per work: title, journal, publisher, publication date, authors with ORCID iDs and affiliations, the abstract as plain text and HTML, reference and citation counts, ISSNs, volume, issue and pages, licenses, funders with grant numbers, and links to the full text. Filter by publication date, work type or abstract availability, and sort by relevance, date or citations. There is no login, no API key and no proxy to configure. Built for literature reviews, research intelligence, bibliometrics, citation tracking and building datasets for AI and search.

⚡ Quick start

{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://search.crossref.org/search/works?q=microplastics+in+drinking+water&from_ui=yes"
    }
  ],
  "maxItems": 5
}

Or search by keyword with filters:

{
  "searchTerms": ["crispr off-target effects"],
  "dateFrom": "2023",
  "type": "journal-article",
  "hasAbstract": true,
  "sortBy": "is-referenced-by-count",
  "maxItems": 50
}

🧩 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
startUrls	array	no	—	Crossref search URLs (search.crossref.org/search/works?q=…) or DOI links (https://doi.org/10.1145/3641289).
searchTerms	array	no	—	Words to search titles, abstracts, authors and journals for, one search per entry.
author	string	no	—	Narrow every search to works by this author. On its own, it searches for the author's works.
dois	array	no	—	DOIs to look up, such as 10.1145/3641289. DOI links and the doi: prefix work too.
issns	array	no	—	Journal ISSNs whose works to list, such as 0028-0836 for Nature.
dateFrom	string	no	—	Published from: only works published on or after this date (2024, 2024-03 or 2024-03-01).
dateTo	string	no	—	Published until: only works published on or before this date.
type	string	no	—	Work type: journal-article, proceedings-article, book-chapter, book, posted-content (preprints), dissertation, report, dataset and more.
hasAbstract	boolean	no	false	Only works with an abstract.
sortBy	string	no	"relevance"	Sort by relevance, published (newest first) or is-referenced-by-count (most cited).
maxItems	integer	no	—	Maximum works per search term, start URL or journal. The input form starts at 5; leave it empty to get every match.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{ "useApifyProxy": false }	Proxy settings. Crossref's public data needs no proxy.

Give at least one of startUrls, searchTerms, author, dois or issns. The filters and the sort order apply to every search and journal; DOI lookups always return the one work.

Search URLs. Search on search.crossref.org and paste the address of the results page. "Sort by year" and "Filter on this publication" carry over.

📤 Output

Each work is one dataset row. Fields Crossref has no value for are null, or an empty list.

Fields

Field	Type	Description
doi	string	The work's DOI.
url	string	The DOI link, which resolves to the publisher's page.
title	string	Title.
subtitle	string	Subtitle, when set.
containerTitle	string	The journal, book or proceedings the work appears in.
publisher	string	Publisher.
type	string	Work type, such as journal-article, book-chapter or posted-content.
publishedDate	string	Publication date (ISO 8601: 2024-03-29, or 2024-03 / 2024 when only that is known).
authors	array	Authors in order: given, family, name, orcid (iD link) and affiliations.
abstractText	string	Abstract as plain text, one paragraph per line.
abstractHtml	string	Abstract as HTML, with italics, sub/superscripts, section headings and paragraphs.
referencesCount	number	Number of references the work cites.
citedByCount	number	Number of Crossref works that cite this one.
subjects	array	Subject areas, when the publisher sets them.
issn	array	ISSNs of the journal.
isbn	array	ISBNs, for books and chapters.
volume	string	Volume.
issue	string	Issue.
page	string	Page range.
articleNumber	string	Article number, for journals that number articles instead of pages.
language	string	Language code, when set.
licenseUrls	array	License links, such as a Creative Commons license.
funders	array	Funders: name, doi (Funder Registry ID) and awards (grant numbers).
fullTextLinks	array	Full-text links the publisher lists: url, contentType and intendedApplication (text-mining, similarity-checking, …).
publisherUrl	string	The page the DOI resolves to.
sourceUrl	string	The search, journal or DOI link this work was found through.

💡 Use cases

• Literature reviews — pull every paper on a topic, with abstracts, into a spreadsheet or reference manager.
• Research intelligence — follow a field, a journal or a competitor lab's output, newest first.
• Bibliometrics — rank works by citations and break output down by journal, publisher, funder or year.
• Funding analysis — see which funders and grants stand behind the work in a field.
• Metadata enrichment — turn a list of DOIs into complete, clean citation records.
• AI and search datasets — collect titles, abstracts and open-license full-text links at scale.

❓ FAQ

• Do I need an API key or a Crossref account? No. Crossref's metadata is public, and the Actor runs without a proxy.
• Why is the abstract empty for some works? Abstracts are deposited by publishers, and many don't. Turn on "Only works with an abstract" to skip those works.
• What does citedByCount count? Citations from other works registered with Crossref. It is usually lower than Google Scholar's count, which also counts web pages, theses and preprint servers.
• A DOI returned nothing. Crossref holds most journal and book DOIs, but not all: arXiv and Zenodo DOIs, for example, are registered with DataCite. The log says when a DOI is not found.
• Can I get more than 10,000 results? Yes, when sorting by relevance or by citations. Sorting newest first stops at 10,000 results per search; narrow it with the date filters, or run several date ranges.
• Can I run many searches at once? Yes. Add several search terms, URLs or ISSNs; maxItems applies to each one separately.

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🤝 Anyx Solutions

We build custom scrapers and data-extraction pipelines.

• Email: tantosthor@gmail.com

🖼 Image credit

Image credit: crossref.org