Our World in Data Scraper

Scrape Our World in Data — the Oxford/Global Change Data Lab platform covering global trends in health, poverty, climate, education, and more. Extract article metadata, downloadable chart datasets (CSV), and country profiles — all without any API key or credentials.

What You Can Scrape

• Articles — browse recent research articles with title, authors, publish date, excerpt, thumbnail, and related chart slugs.
• Chart Data — download the underlying dataset (CSV rows) for any OWID Grapher chart by its slug, with optional country/year filters.
• Chart Data Bulk — download datasets from multiple charts in one run.
• Countries — browse country profiles (250+ countries) with name, description, and related charts.

Output Fields

Article records (recordType: "article")

Field	Type	Description
articleSlug	string	URL slug (e.g. climate-change)
title	string	Article headline
publishedAt	string	ISO 8601 publish date
updatedAt	string	ISO 8601 last modified date
authors	array	List of author names
primaryAuthor	string	First-listed author
excerpt	string	Short description / abstract
thumbnailUrl	string	Article cover image URL
relatedCharts	array	Grapher chart slugs referenced in the article
articleUrl	string	Canonical article URL
scrapedAt	string	UTC timestamp when record was scraped
recordType	string	Always "article"

Chart config records (recordType: "chartConfig")

Field	Type	Description
chartSlug	string	Chart identifier slug
chartId	integer	OWID internal chart ID
title	string	Chart title
subtitle	string	Chart subtitle
note	string	Chart footnote
chartTypes	array	Visualisation types (e.g. LineChart, ScatterPlot)
citation	string	Data source attribution
dataColumns	array	Column names in the CSV dataset
relatedQuestionUrls	array	Related article links
chartUrl	string	Canonical Grapher URL

Chart data rows (recordType: "chartDataRow")

Field	Type	Description
chartSlug	string	Source chart identifier
chartTitle	string	Human-readable chart title
entity	string	Country, region, or aggregate name
entityCode	string	ISO country code (if available)
year	integer	Year of the data point
<variable>	number	One or more data columns (names vary per chart)
sourceUrl	string	Canonical chart URL

Country records (recordType: "country")

Field	Type	Description
countrySlug	string	URL slug (e.g. germany)
countryName	string	Display name
description	string	Short country description
thumbnailUrl	string	Country thumbnail image
relatedCharts	array	Grapher slugs for this country
countryUrl	string	Country profile URL

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	articles	What to scrape: articles, chartData, chartDataBulk, countries
searchQuery	string	—	Keyword filter for article titles/excerpts
topic	select	—	Filter articles by topic area
chartSlug	string	—	Chart slug for chartData mode (e.g. life-expectancy)
chartSlugs	array	—	Multiple slugs for chartDataBulk mode
entities	array	—	Filter chart rows to specific countries/regions
yearFrom	integer	—	Minimum year for chart data rows
yearTo	integer	—	Maximum year for chart data rows
includeChartConfig	boolean	true	Emit a config record before chart data rows
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum records to emit

Example Inputs

Browse latest articles about climate change

{
  "mode": "articles",
  "searchQuery": "climate change",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Download life expectancy data for Germany and France (1950–2023)

{
  "mode": "chartData",
  "chartSlug": "life-expectancy",
  "entities": ["Germany", "France"],
  "yearFrom": 1950,
  "yearTo": 2023,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Bulk download multiple charts

{
  "mode": "chartDataBulk",
  "chartSlugs": ["co2-emissions-vs-gdp", "child-mortality", "global-education"],
  "entities": ["World"],
  "maxItems": 1000
}

Browse country profiles

{
  "mode": "countries",
  "searchQuery": "germany",
  "maxItems": 10
}

Use Cases

• Research & academia — download multi-decade global datasets (CO₂, life expectancy, GDP, mortality) for analysis.
• Journalism — find the latest OWID articles on a topic and enrich stories with chart data.
• Education — build classroom materials using OWID's curated global statistics.
• Data pipelines — automate ingestion of specific chart datasets on a schedule.
• Content discovery — monitor new articles published on specific topics.

Finding Chart Slugs

Chart slugs appear in every OWID chart URL: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/{slug}.

Popular examples:

• life-expectancy — Life expectancy at birth (1950–2024)
• co2-emissions-vs-gdp — CO₂ emissions vs. GDP per capita
• child-mortality — Child mortality rate by country
• global-education — Years of schooling
• share-of-population-in-extreme-poverty — Poverty headcount ratio
• annual-co-emissions-by-region — Annual CO₂ by region
• vaccination-coverage-who-unicef — Vaccine coverage

FAQ

Does this require an API key? No. All OWID data is publicly available. No registration or API key is needed.

How many articles are available? OWID publishes 1,900+ articles and research topics. The Atom feed provides the 10 most recent; setting maxItems higher triggers sitemap crawling for older content.

How many chart datasets are available? OWID hosts 3,000+ Grapher charts. Each has a downloadable CSV via the .csv endpoint.

What is the largest chart dataset? Multi-country charts spanning 200+ years can have 50,000+ rows. Use entities and yearFrom/yearTo filters to limit output.

Can I get data for a specific country over time? Yes — use chartData mode with entities: ["Germany"] and yearFrom/yearTo to extract time-series data for a single country.

Is there rate limiting? OWID's public API is politely crawled with 0.3s delays between requests. No API rate limits apply to static CSV/JSON endpoints.