ORCID Scraper: Researcher Profiles & Affiliations

Turns an ORCID iD, or a name search, into a structured researcher record: names and aliases, biography, keywords, employment and education history with ROR-identified organisations, funding awards with grant numbers, peer-review counts and the full works list with DOIs.

ORCID is the scholarly world's identity registry, and its public API is designed to be read by machines. This Actor reads it directly, so there is no browser, no proxy, no member credentials and no OAuth token. Five full records arrive with works, affiliations and funding attached.

Agent skill: SKILL.md

https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/t7YoTxpZEJOWvw4Ug/records/orcid-researcher-scraper.md

What you get

Field	What it holds
orcid, url	The iD and the public profile link
givenNames, familyName, creditName, otherNames	Preferred name, published name, and every alias the researcher has registered
biography	Free-text bio when the researcher has made it public
emails	Public email addresses. Almost always empty, because ORCID defaults emails to private
researcherUrls	Named links: LinkedIn, Google Scholar, lab page, personal site
keywords	Self-declared research keywords
countries	Country codes from the researcher's registered addresses
currentAffiliation	The open-ended employment, most recent first, which is what a profile page shows at the top
employments, educations	Full history: organisation, department, role, start and end dates, city, region, country, ROR or Ringgold ID
fundings, fundingCount	Grants and awards with funder, type, dates and grant number
works, worksCount	Publications with title, type, publication date, DOI, journal and source. worksCount is the true total even when works is capped
peerReviewCount	Number of reviews recorded against the record
createdAt, lastModified	When the ORCID record was registered and last edited
scrapedAt	Run timestamp

RUN_SUMMARY in the key-value store holds per-run counts, how many iDs came from search, the filters you used, and any iD that failed.

Use cases

• Credential verification at scale. Check a claimed affiliation against the researcher's own registry entry.
• Expert finding. Search by keyword and institution, then rank by works count and recency.
• Affiliation mapping. Build an institution-to-researcher graph using ROR identifiers rather than fuzzy name strings.
• RAG and knowledge bases. Clean, permissively reusable scholarly identity metadata with DOI-level joins.
• Bibliometrics. Join works[].doi to Crossref, OpenAlex or Europe PMC for citation data ORCID does not carry.

Quick start

One researcher, everything:

{
 "orcidIds": ["0000-0002-1825-0097"],
 "contactEmail": "you@example.com"
}

Several iDs, identity only, small and fast:

{
 "orcidIds": ["0000-0002-1825-0097", "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5109-3700"],
 "includeWorks": false,
 "includeFunding": false,
 "contactEmail": "you@example.com"
}

Discover researchers by institution and topic, then fetch them in full:

{
 "searchQuery": "affiliation-org-name:\"ETH Zurich\" AND keyword:genomics",
 "maxSearchResults": 100,
 "maxWorks": 50,
 "contactEmail": "you@example.com"
}

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
orcidIds	array	[]	iDs as 0000-0000-0000-0000, or full https://orcid.org/. URLs. Both are normalised.
searchQuery	string	none	Runs ORCID's public search and fetches every iD it returns. Combines with orcidIds, and the two sets are merged and de-duplicated.
maxSearchResults	integer	25	Ceiling on iDs the search may contribute. Each costs one record request.
includeAffiliations	boolean	true	Attach employments and educations.
includeWorks	boolean	true	Attach works. This is what makes records large.
includeFunding	boolean	true	Attach fundings.
maxWorks	integer	200	Cap on attached works, newest first. worksCount still reports the real total.
contactEmail	string	none	Goes into the User-Agent. Optional but recommended.

Supply orcidIds, searchQuery, or both. With neither, the run fails immediately with a message saying so.

Output example

{
 "orcid": "0000-0001-5109-3700",
 "url": "https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5109-3700",
 "givenNames": "Laurel",
 "familyName": "Haak",
 "creditName": "Laurel L Haak",
 "otherNames": ["L Haak", "Laure Haak", "ローレル・ハーク"],
 "biography": "Laurel (Laure) L. Haak (she/they) is an entrepreneur, strategist, researcher, and author.",
 "emails": [],
 "researcherUrls": [
 { "name": "LinkedIn", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurellhaak/" },
 { "name": "Google Scholar", "url": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=fFjR4DoAAAAJ" }
 ],
 "keywords": ["persistent identifiers", "research policy", "multi stakeholder governance"],
 "countries": ["US"],
 "currentAffiliation": "Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship 2.0",
 "employments": [
 {
 "type": "employment",
 "organization": "Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship 2.0",
 "department": null,
 "roleTitle": "Research Scholar",
 "startDate": "2025-11",
 "endDate": null,
 "city": "Sacramento",
 "region": "California",
 "country": "US",
 "organizationId": "https://ror.org/000xkb537",
 "organizationIdSource": "ROR",
 "url": null
 }
 ],
 "educations": [
 {
 "type": "education",
 "organization": "Stanford University School of Medicine",
 "department": "Neurosciences",
 "roleTitle": "PhD",
 "startDate": null,
 "endDate": "1997",
 "city": "Stanford",
 "region": "California",
 "country": "US",
 "organizationId": null,
 "organizationIdSource": null,
 "url": null
 }
 ],
 "fundings": [
 {
 "title": "ADVANCE Leadership Award: Women in Science and Engineering",
 "type": "grant",
 "organization": "National Science Foundation - Directorate for Education and Human Resources",
 "country": "US",
 "startDate": "2006-04-01",
 "endDate": "2007-03-31",
 "grantNumber": "0536999",
 "url": null
 }
 ],
 "fundingCount": 4,
 "works": [
 {
 "title": "FIELD DAY - Open Research Infrastructure for Education Research with Digital Games",
 "subtitle": null,
 "type": "report",
 "publicationDate": "2025-11-14",
 "journalTitle": null,
 "doi": "10.17613/BMHWG-WXZ66",
 "url": "https://works.hcommons.org/doi/10.17613/bmhwg-wxz66",
 "putCode": 222309679,
 "source": "Laurel L Haak"
 }
 ],
 "worksCount": 227,
 "peerReviewCount": 2,
 "createdAt": "2012-09-28T17:19:08.336Z",
 "lastModified": "2026-07-30T19:09:40.855Z",
 "scrapedAt": "2026-08-06T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Dates from ORCID are frequently partial: a bare 1997, or 2025-11 with no day. They are passed through as written rather than padded to a fake full date.

Search syntax

searchQuery goes straight to ORCID's public search index, which speaks Solr syntax. Plain words search the whole record, and field prefixes narrow it:

Query	Finds
Hopper	Anything in the record matching "Hopper"
family-name:Hopper AND given-names:Grace	A specific person by name
affiliation-org-name:"ETH Zurich"	Everyone who lists that institution
keyword:bioinformatics	Everyone with that self-declared keyword
digital-object-ids:"10.1038/nature12373"	The authors who claimed a specific DOI
ringgold-org-id:5468	Everyone at an organisation by its Ringgold ID

Quote multi-word values. A malformed query is reported as a syntax error rather than being retried into a timeout.

API example

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/arman-bd~orcid-researcher-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
 -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
 -d '{
 "orcidIds": ["0000-0002-1825-0097"],
 "maxWorks": 25,
 "contactEmail": "you@example.com"
 }'

JavaScript example

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('arman-bd/orcid-researcher-scraper').call({
 searchQuery: 'affiliation-org-name:"ETH Zurich" AND keyword:genomics',
 maxSearchResults: 50,
 maxWorks: 20,
 contactEmail: 'you@example.com',
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
for (const r of items) {
 console.log(`${r.givenNames} ${r.familyName} - ${r.currentAffiliation} - ${r.worksCount} works`);
}

Limits and behaviour

• Every request carries Accept: application/json. ORCID's v3.0 API defaults to XML, and without that header you get a document that looks nothing like this.
• One bad iD won't kill the run. A deactivated record answers 409 and an unknown iD 404. Both are recorded in RUN_SUMMARY.failures and the run continues, so the Actor only errors out if every iD fails.
• Works are sorted newest first before truncation. ORCID returns them in its own display order, so capping without sorting would keep an arbitrary slice.
• worksCount is never capped. It counts the groups ORCID returned, so it stays honest even when maxWorks trims the list to 20.
• Grouped works are collapsed. One publication claimed by Crossref, Scopus and the researcher is one group and one row, the preferred summary. DOIs are read from the group's shared external IDs first.
• Requests are spaced 200 ms apart, with three retries on 429 and 5xx.
• Public data only. Everything here is what the researcher chose to publish. Private and trusted-party-only fields are never returned by this API and are not visible to this Actor.

FAQ

Do I need an ORCID member API key? No. You supply no credentials.

Why is emails empty? Because ORCID defaults email visibility to private, and most researchers leave it that way. When somebody has made theirs public it appears here.

Can I search by DOI? Yes. Put digital-object-ids:"10.1038/nature12373" in searchQuery and you get the ORCID iDs of everyone who has claimed that paper.

How many researchers can I fetch in one run? There is no hard cap. Records are fetched sequentially at roughly four a second, so a thousand takes about five minutes. The default timeout is 30 minutes.

Does it include citation counts? No. ORCID records identity and claimed works, not citations. Join on works[].doi against Crossref or OpenAlex for that.

Is scraping ORCID allowed? Yes. The public API exists for this, ORCID publishes its data under CC0, and this Actor identifies itself in the User-Agent as their documentation asks.