Professor & Researcher Lead Finder

Professor & Researcher Lead Finder is a professor email finder for building fresh, verified researcher leads by field, conference, or journal from public academic sources.

What it does

Enter a research topic such as computer vision or a venue such as AAAI or Nature Methods. The Actor finds researchers who are actively publishing in that area, ranks them by relevance, and returns structured profiles with recent work and academic affiliations. When email finding is enabled, it searches public research papers and institutional sources, verifies each discovered address, and reports its source tier and confidence. The result is a live academic prospect list rather than a stale export from a general business database.

Who it's for

• EdTech companies and academic SaaS teams
• Lab equipment and reagent vendors
• Research-tool startups
• GPU and cloud-compute vendors targeting AI labs
• PhD and postdoc recruiters
• Academic publishers

What you get

Each lead can include:

• Name: The researcher's published name.
• Institution: Their current or most relevant academic affiliation.
• Country: The institution's country.
• ORCID: A persistent researcher identifier when available.
• Corresponding-author flag: Whether the researcher is marked as a corresponding author on a matched paper.
• Recent papers: Relevant recent publications used to establish research activity.
• Lead score: A relevance and quality score from 0 to 100.
• Tier: A quick hot, warm, or cool classification based on the lead score.
• Email: A public professional email when one is found and passes verification.
• Email tier: Provenance classified as paper-verified, page-found, or pattern-inferred.
• Email status: Verification result such as verified, catch-all, or risky.
• Email confidence: The Actor's confidence in the reported email.

How the email finding works

The Actor uses a four-stage waterfall designed for strong provenance and fewer false positives:

1. The researcher's own recent papers: It first extracts author emails from Europe PMC full text and open-access PDFs. This is the highest-provenance source because the address appears with the researcher's published work.
2. Institution faculty pages: If a paper does not expose an email, the Actor checks public university and research institution pages.
3. A cross-run learned pattern library: The Actor learns institution email formats across runs. The library becomes more useful and accurate as the Actor runs, helping infer likely addresses when direct sources are unavailable.
4. Verification before delivery: Every candidate is verified before it is reported. Results include email status, confidence, and provenance so you can judge how the address was found.

Inputs

Field	What it does	Default
query	Research field, conference, or journal to search, such as AAAI, Nature Methods, or computer vision.	Required, with AAAI as the Console prefill
maxLeads	Maximum number of ranked researcher leads to return.	50
maxEmails	Hard cap on billed emails, independent of the number of leads. 0 allows up to maxLeads.	0
findEmails	Enables public-source email discovery and verification.	true
country	Filters by a two-letter country code such as US or GB. Leave empty for worldwide results.	US
yearsBack	Limits matched papers to this many recent calendar years.	3
correspondingOnly	Returns only researchers marked as corresponding authors on at least one matched paper.	false
includeIndustry	Includes company-affiliated and other non-academic researchers.	false
maxEmailLookups	Caps how many leads the email waterfall attempts. 0 uses the maxLeads limit. This controls lookup work, not billed email successes.	0
venueIds	Exact OpenAlex source IDs to use instead of resolving a venue name.	[]

Pricing and controlling your spend

This Actor uses pay per event pricing, plus the platform usage for compute and proxy resources:

• Actor start: $0.00005 per run.
• author-extracted: $0.004 per lead returned.
• email-found: $0.12 per verified email. This is the main cost. It is charged only when a real verified or catch-all email is found, so misses are free.

Use maxLeads to control how many researcher records are returned. Use maxEmails as a hard cap on how many successful email discoveries can be billed, independently of lead count. You can also set Apify's native Max cost per run for a hard dollar ceiling covering Actor events.

Every run logs an upfront cost estimate based on your limits and a final actual-spend summary. For example, 200 leads with maxEmails=20 costs about $0.80 for lead extraction plus up to $2.40 for emails, or about $3.20 maximum, plus the $0.00005 start event and your own platform compute or proxy usage.

General lead databases such as Apollo and ZoomInfo can be weak on academics because academic roles and publication activity change outside normal company datasets. This Actor builds the list live from researchers who are actually publishing, at about $0.12 per verified email compared with roughly $0.30 to $1.00+ per contact elsewhere.

Example

Input:

{"query":"AAAI","maxLeads":25,"maxEmails":25}

Sample output row, for illustration only:

{
  "name": "Dr. Maya Chen",
  "institution": "Example Institute of Technology",
  "institutionCountry": "US",
  "orcid": "0000-0002-1234-5678",
  "isCorresponding": true,
  "recentPapers": [
    {
      "title": "Reliable Planning for Multimodal Agents",
      "year": 2026,
      "venue": "AAAI"
    }
  ],
  "score": 92,
  "tier": "hot",
  "email": "maya.chen@example.edu",
  "emailTier": "paper-verified",
  "emailStatus": "verified",
  "emailConfidence": 0.98
}

FAQ

Where does the data come from?

Researcher and publication data comes from public academic sources, including OpenAlex. Email discovery uses public Europe PMC full text, open-access papers and PDFs, and institution faculty pages.

Is the data public and legal to use?

The Actor searches publicly accessible academic and institutional sources. You are responsible for using the results in accordance with applicable privacy, marketing, anti-spam, and data-protection laws, as well as the terms that apply to your outreach.

Which conferences and journals work?

You can search by research field, conference, or journal name. Well-indexed venues such as AAAI and Nature Methods work directly, and advanced users can provide exact OpenAlex source IDs in venueIds when name resolution is ambiguous.

Why do some leads have no email?

Not every researcher publishes an address or has a discoverable faculty page. The Actor does not charge the email-found event for misses, and it avoids reporting candidates that do not pass verification.

How accurate are the emails?

Every reported email is checked before delivery and includes a verification status, confidence value, and provenance tier. Paper-extracted addresses have the strongest provenance, followed by faculty-page addresses and verified pattern-inferred addresses. catch-all and risky statuses should be handled more cautiously than verified results.

Does it support researchers outside the United States?

Yes. Set country to another two-letter country code or leave it empty to search worldwide. Coverage varies with publication indexing, open-access availability, and the public web presence of each institution.