Figshare Scraper

Scrape research articles, datasets, code, figures, and more from Figshare using its public REST API — no authentication or proxy required.

What It Does

This actor extracts metadata and content information from Figshare, one of the world's largest open research data repositories. It supports full-text keyword search, direct article ID lookup, and institution-specific article browsing across all Figshare content types.

Key Features

• No authentication required — uses the public Figshare API
• Three modes: keyword search, fetch by ID, or browse by institution
• Filter by content type: datasets, papers, theses, code, figures, presentations, and more
• Full detail extraction: authors, categories, tags, license, files, DOI
• HTML description stripping — descriptions are returned as clean plain text
• Automatic pagination — retrieves up to 1,000 results per run

Input Fields

Field	Type	Description
mode	Select	searchArticles (default), getById, or searchByInstitution
searchQuery	String	Keyword query (e.g. climate change, CRISPR)
itemType	Select	Filter by content type (see table below)
articleIds	Array	Figshare article IDs for getById mode
institutionId	String	Institution numeric ID for searchByInstitution mode
maxItems	Integer	Max results to return (1–1000, default 50)

Item Types

Value	Type
(empty)	All types
1	Figure
2	Media
3	Dataset
4	Poster
5	Paper
6	Presentation
7	Thesis
8	Code
9	Preprint

Output Fields

Each item in the dataset contains:

Field	Type	Description
articleId	Integer	Unique Figshare article ID
title	String	Article title
description	String	Plain-text abstract/description (HTML stripped)
doi	String	Digital Object Identifier
publishedDate	String	Publication date (ISO 8601)
modifiedDate	String	Last modified date (ISO 8601)
authors	Array	List of author full names
tags	Array	Keyword tags
categories	Array	Subject category names
license	String	License name (e.g. CC BY 4.0)
figshareUrl	String	Public URL on Figshare
sourceUrl	String	Same as figshareUrl
thumbUrl	String	Thumbnail image URL
downloadUrl	String	Direct download URL for the primary file
itemType	String	Content type name (e.g. dataset, paper)
citation	String	Full citation string
viewCount	Integer	Number of views (when available)
citationCount	Integer	Number of citations (when available)
recordType	String	Always "article"
scrapedAt	String	Timestamp when the record was scraped

Example Output

{
  "articleId": 32513898,
  "title": "Perspectives of Allied Health Professionals on Digital Health Services in South Australia",
  "description": "This research project explores the perspectives of allied health professionals on digital health services in South Australia.",
  "doi": "10.25909/32513898.v1",
  "publishedDate": "2026-05-30T02:03:44Z",
  "modifiedDate": "2026-05-30T02:03:44Z",
  "authors": ["Muhammad Khan"],
  "tags": ["digital health activism"],
  "categories": ["Audiology", "Occupational therapy", "Physiotherapy", "Speech pathology"],
  "license": "CC BY 4.0",
  "figshareUrl": "https://adelaide.figshare.com/articles/poster/...",
  "sourceUrl": "https://adelaide.figshare.com/articles/poster/...",
  "thumbUrl": "https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ppreviews-adelaide-.../thumb.png",
  "downloadUrl": "https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/65104542",
  "itemType": "poster",
  "citation": "Khan, Muhammad (2026). Perspectives of Allied Health...",
  "recordType": "article",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-30T10:00:00.000000+00:00"
}

Use Cases

• Research discovery: Find datasets or papers by keyword across all disciplines
• Data science: Collect open datasets for analysis and modeling
• Literature reviews: Gather papers, theses, and preprints by topic
• Institution profiling: Browse all public outputs from a specific university
• Open science auditing: Track open data and code availability by subject
• Citation analysis: Collect DOIs for downstream citation graph work

FAQs

Q: Does this require an API key? A: No. The Figshare public API is freely accessible without authentication.

Q: How many results can I get? A: Up to 1,000 per run. Figshare hosts millions of items.

Q: What does searchByInstitution mode do? A: It retrieves all public articles published by a specific institution on Figshare. You need the institution's numeric ID (e.g., University of Manchester = 2).

Q: Are descriptions HTML-free? A: Yes. The actor strips all HTML tags from descriptions, returning clean plain text.

Q: Why is viewCount sometimes absent? A: The Figshare public API does not always return view/citation statistics in the article detail endpoint. The field is only included when the data is available.

Q: Can I search for code repositories? A: Yes — set itemType to 8 (Code) and use any keyword in searchQuery.

Q: How fresh is the data? A: The Figshare API returns live data. New uploads appear within minutes of publication.