NSF Research Awards Scraper

Extract structured data from the NSF (National Science Foundation) Research Awards database — comprehensive information on federally funded research grants awarded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. This Actor fetches award records including awardee institution, principal investigator name, funding amount, program classification, and award timeline. Perfect for research intelligence, lead generation to academic institutions and research centers, and analyzing publicly funded research initiatives.

The NSF Awards API is an open data source documenting all federally funded research grants awarded by the National Science Foundation. Data is updated continuously as new awards are made. This Actor enables bulk extraction with filtering by award date range, awardee state, and keyword search.

Key Features

• Complete NSF awards database access — Extract award records from the official NSF Research Awards API
• Flexible date filtering — Filter by award start date (e.g., awards granted since 01/01/2024)
• Keyword search — Search across award title and program classification (case-insensitive)
• State filtering — Isolate awards to specific states (e.g., California, Texas, New York)
• Principal investigator data — Extract PI names (public federal records, no email/contact data)
• Funding intelligence — Capture obligation amount for each award
• No authentication required — Public NSF API, no keys or credentials needed
• Batch-optimized output — Clean JSON ready for CRM integration, research dashboards, or analysis pipelines

Output Data Fields

Field	Type	Description
awardId	string	NSF Award ID (unique identifier)
title	string	Award/research project title
awardeeName	string	Awardee institution or organization name
awardeeCity	string	City where the awardee is located
awardeeState	string	2-letter state code of awardee location
awardeeZip	string	ZIP code of awardee location
fundsObligated	number	Total obligated funding amount (USD)
piName	string	Principal Investigator name(s)
startDate	string	Award start date (ISO YYYY-MM-DD)
programName	string	NSF program classification
awardUrl	string	Direct link to award on NSF website

How to Scrape NSF Research Award Data

1. Navigate to the NSF Research Awards Scraper Actor on Apify Store.
2. Click Start to open the input configuration form.
3. (Optional) Adjust Award Start Date to retrieve awards granted after a specific date (default: 01/01/2024, format MM/DD/YYYY).
4. (Optional) Enter a Keyword Filter to search across award titles and programs (e.g., "machine learning", "climate", "cancer research").
5. (Optional) Enter an Awardee State Code to filter to a specific state (e.g., "CA" for California).
6. (Optional) Set Max Results to control output size (default: 500, max: 5000).
7. Click Start to run the Actor.
8. Download results as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Dataset tab.

Input Example

{
    "dateStart": "01/01/2024",
    "keyword": "machine learning",
    "awardeeStateCode": "CA",
    "maxResults": 100
}

Output Example

{
    "awardId": "2408215",
    "title": "Collaborative Research: CCRI: III: CloudLab",
    "awardeeName": "University of California, San Diego",
    "awardeeCity": "La Jolla",
    "awardeeState": "CA",
    "awardeeZip": "92093",
    "fundsObligated": 500000,
    "piName": "Geoffrey M. Voelker",
    "startDate": "2024-06-15",
    "programName": "Computer & Network Systems",
    "awardUrl": "https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2408215"
}

Pricing

This Actor fetches data from the free, public NSF Research Awards API with paginated requests. No authentication or special credentials are required.

• Cost per run: ~$0.0002–0.0005 (light compute, paginated API calls)
• Actor start event: Default platform rate
• Per-result pricing: $0.003/result

Typical run time is 30–120 seconds depending on result count and filter complexity.

Use Cases

• Research institution lead generation — Identify universities and research centers receiving federal funding in your target sector
• Competitive intelligence — Track which institutions are funded in areas relevant to your technology or product
• Funding trend analysis — Analyze NSF funding distribution by state, program, and year
• Research partnerships — Discover active research groups and PIs in your field for collaboration outreach
• Market research — Understand federal R&D spending priorities by examining award patterns
• Academic sales intelligence — Prioritize outreach to well-funded institutions
• RAG pipeline ingestion — Clean structured output ready for LLM-based research analysis
• Database building — Populate internal research institution or grant opportunity databases

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape NSF award data?

Yes. This Actor accesses publicly available data from the NSF Research Awards database, which is published as open government data maintained by the National Science Foundation. No authentication is required. The data is freely available for any use, including commercial use.

How much does it cost to scrape all NSF awards?

NSF maintains 100,000+ active awards. At $0.003 per result, extracting all awards would cost approximately $300 in Actor fees plus minimal Apify compute costs. However, most users filter by date range, state, or keyword to extract smaller, more targeted datasets (e.g., 50–1000 awards per run).

Can I export NSF award data to Excel or CSV?

Yes. Apify supports exporting results in JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, and other formats directly from the Dataset tab after a run completes.

How often is NSF award data updated?

NSF updates the database continuously as new awards are granted. You can schedule this Actor to run on a weekly or monthly basis to capture newly funded awards.

What if an award has multiple principal investigators?

The piName field contains the first PI listed in the NSF record. Some awards have multiple PIs; the full list can be retrieved from the awardUrl link on NSF's website.

Is PI email or contact information included?

No. This Actor returns only publicly available PI names (public federal records). Email addresses and phone numbers are not scraped or returned.

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• NIST NVD Scraper — Extract CVE vulnerability data from the NIST National Vulnerability Database

Legal Disclaimer

This Actor extracts publicly available data from the NSF Research Awards database, which is published as open government data maintained by the U.S. National Science Foundation. No authentication or terms-of-service bypass is involved. Principal investigator names and award details are public federal records (FOIA). Users are responsible for ensuring their use of the extracted data complies with applicable laws and regulations. For support, contact the Actor developer through the Apify Store.