Academic Paper Search: Research Papers & Literature Search

Search 250M+ scholarly papers across four open databases at once: OpenAlex, Crossref, arXiv and PubMed. You get one clean, de-duplicated list (merged by DOI and title) with authors, abstracts, citation counts, venues and free PDF links where they exist.

It's an open alternative to Google Scholar scraping. It uses only official public APIs, so it needs no API keys, no proxies and no CAPTCHAs, and it doesn't break when a site changes its layout.

How to use

1. Type your search query (topic, title words or keywords).
2. Pick sources (OpenAlex, Crossref, arXiv, PubMed), a year range and sort order.
3. Click Start and get de-duplicated papers with abstracts, citations, DOIs and free PDF links.

What you get per paper

Field	Example
title, authors, year, publicationDate	"Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks", ["Patrick Lewis", …], 2020
venue, type	"NeurIPS", "article" / "preprint"
doi, url	10.48550/arxiv.2005.11401, https://doi.org/...
pdfUrl, isOpenAccess	Direct open-access PDF (arXiv, PMC, OpenAlex best OA location)
citedByCount	1187. This is the highest count reported by OpenAlex or Crossref.
abstract	Full abstract text. OpenAlex inverted indexes are rebuilt into plain text, and Crossref JATS tags are stripped.
topics	OpenAlex topics, arXiv categories, Crossref subjects
ids	openalex, arxiv, pmid, pmcid
sources, foundIn	Which databases returned the paper. Papers found in several databases rank higher.

Why this Actor

• Four databases, one schema, no duplicates. The same paper in OpenAlex, PubMed and Crossref comes back as a single row, with the best value for each field.
• Relevance that holds up. Loose keyword matches are dropped, and results are ranked by query-term coverage, agreement across databases and citations. You can also sort by newest or most cited.
• Filters: year range, open access only, and only papers with abstracts (handy for RAG and LLM pipelines).
• Fair pay-per-result pricing: $1.00 per 1,000 unique papers. Error records are free, and if a source is down you still get the other sources' results without paying for the failure.
• Fast: 300 merged papers in about 10 seconds in our tests.

Use cases

• Literature reviews and systematic-review screening (export to CSV/Excel)
• Building RAG corpora and knowledge bases from abstracts and OA PDFs
• Research monitoring: schedule a daily run sorted by newest
• Citation and trend analysis for a topic, author or venue
• Feeding AI agents (MCP-friendly, structured JSON)

Input example

{
  "query": "retrieval augmented generation",
  "sources": ["openalex", "crossref", "arxiv", "pubmed"],
  "maxItems": 200,
  "sort": "relevance",
  "yearFrom": 2023,
  "openAccessOnly": false,
  "requireAbstract": true
}

Output example

{
  "rank": 1,
  "query": "retrieval augmented generation",
  "title": "Ragas: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation",
  "authors": ["Shahul Es", "Jithin James", "Luis Espinosa-Anke", "Steven Schockaert"],
  "year": 2023,
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2309.15217",
  "pdfUrl": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.15217v2",
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "citedByCount": 612,
  "abstract": "We introduce Ragas (Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment), a framework for reference-free evaluation...",
  "sources": ["arxiv", "openalex"],
  "foundIn": 2
}

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per unique paper delivered, which is $1 per 1,000. Apify's small start event applies. Use maxItems and your run's maximum charge to cap spend.

How much does it cost?

You only pay for results, never for compute time:

You get	You pay (Starter/Bronze plan price)
100 papers	$0.10
1,000 papers	$1.00
10,000 papers	$10.00

Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage every month, and free-plan users pay half price on this Actor, so that covers about 10,000 papers at no cost. Paid plans get volume discounts (Silver -10%, Gold -20%). Set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly at your limit.

FAQ

Is this legal and stable? Yes. It uses only the official open APIs of OpenAlex (CC0 data), Crossref, arXiv and NCBI E-utilities, and respects their rate limits. It doesn't scrape Google Scholar.

Why do some papers have no abstract? Not every publisher deposits abstracts. Turn on requireAbstract to skip those papers.

Citation counts differ from Google Scholar. Scholar counts more document types. This Actor reports the higher of the OpenAlex and Crossref counts.

Need a field or source added (Semantic Scholar, DOAJ, bioRxiv)? Open an issue on the Actor page.

Run it from code (API, Python, JavaScript)

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/api-co~academic-papers-search/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"query": "retrieval augmented generation", "maxItems": 20}'

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("api-co/academic-papers-search").call(run_input={"query": "retrieval augmented generation", "maxItems": 20})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';
const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('api-co/academic-papers-search').call({"query": "retrieval augmented generation", "maxItems": 20});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

It also works from AI agents through the Apify MCP server, and with Zapier, Make, n8n, Google Sheets and webhooks. You can schedule it in the Apify Console.