NIH Grants Scraper — RePORTER Funding & PI Data

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Quick answer: The NIH Grants Scraper searches NIH RePORTER and exports funded grants — project title, abstract, award amount, fiscal year, recipient institution, principal investigator and NIH institute/center — into JSON, CSV or Excel. RePORTER's full corpus is about 2.9 million project records and its API caps how deep any one query can page, so we require a real filter (fiscal year, text, institution, PI or agency) before a run starts, page within NIH's own ceilings, and unpack its bracket-packed <Term A><Term B> topic strings into a real JSON array. Pricing is pay-per-result — $6.20 per 1 000 grants, no subscription, no card required to try it.

🎯 What this scrapes

NIH RePORTER is the federal government's public record of every grant it funds — but its unfiltered corpus is 2.9 million project records, its search API caps how deep any single query can page, and it packs research topics into a single string like <Term A><Term B> instead of a usable list. This Actor requires a real filter (fiscal year, text, institution, PI or agency), pages within the platform's own limits, and flattens every project — title, abstract, award amount, institution, PI and agency — into one clean row.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🏛️ Required-filter guardrail — we block an unfiltered run before it starts so you never accidentally pay for a crawl of NIH's entire 2.9M-project history.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 429/5xx and transient network errors — up to 5 attempts per page.
• 📄 Pagination that respects NIH's own ceilings — page size and offset limits handled for you, with a clear status message if a search is too broad to page all the way through.
• 🧹 Terms and PI lists flattened — NIH's bracket-packed <Term A><Term B> strings become a real JSON array, and every principal investigator is a structured record.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for grant records that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Track who got NIH funding in your therapeutic area before a partnership or licensing conversation.
• Build a competitive-intelligence feed of a rival institution's or PI's active grants.
• Size a research niche's funding trend across fiscal years for a market or investment thesis.
• Feed a grant-writing or business-development CRM with fresh award data instead of a stale export.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
fiscalYears	array	no	[2024]	Only grants active/awarded in these fiscal years, e.g. [2024, 2025].
textSearch	string	no	'cancer immunotherapy'	Match this text against project title, abstract and indexed research terms.
orgNames	array	no	'—'	Recipient institution names to match, e.g. 'Harvard University'.
piNames	array	no	'—'	Principal investigator names to match, e.g. 'Smith'.
agencies	array	no	'—'	NIH institute/center abbreviation codes to match, e.g. 'NCI', 'NIAID'.
minAwardAmount	integer	no	'—'	Only grants awarded at least this much, in US dollars.
maxAwardAmount	integer	no	'—'	Only grants awarded at most this much, in US dollars.
maxResults	integer	no	100	Stop after this many grant records. Each record is one billed result row.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': False}	NIH RePORTER is a public federal API and does not need a proxy. Leave this off unless your account requires egress…

Example input

{
  "fiscalYears": [
    2024
  ],
  "textSearch": "cancer immunotherapy",
  "maxResults": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
appl_id	integer	NIH RePORTER application ID.
project_num	string	Full project number for this fiscal year.
core_project_num	string	Project number without the year suffix.
project_title	string	Project title.
abstract_text	string	Project abstract as submitted to NIH.
fiscal_year	integer	Fiscal year of this award record.
award_amount	number	Total award amount, USD.
direct_cost_amt	number	Direct cost portion, USD.
indirect_cost_amt	number	Indirect cost portion, USD.
org_name	string	Recipient institution name.
org_city	string	Recipient institution city.
org_state	string	Recipient institution US state code.
org_country	string	Recipient institution country.
agency_code	string	Funding NIH institute/center abbreviation.
agency_name	string	Funding NIH institute/center full name.
contact_pi_name	string	Contact principal investigator, as printed.
investigators	array	All listed principal investigators.
project_start_date	string	Project period start.
project_end_date	string	Project period end.
is_active	boolean	Whether the project is currently active.
spending_categories_desc	string	Human-readable NIH spending/topic categories.
terms	array	Indexed research terms for this project.
project_detail_url	string	NIH RePORTER project detail page.

Example output

{}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.006	Per dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $6.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• Returns NIH RePORTER's published record only — no reviewer scores, summary statements or non-NIH federal funders.
• A single search can page roughly 15,000 records deep; broader topics need multiple narrower runs (e.g. one per fiscal year).

❓ FAQ

Do I need an API key?

No. NIH RePORTER's search API is public and keyless — you just need a filter narrow enough to page through.

Why do I have to set a filter?

NIH RePORTER's unfiltered corpus is 2.9 million project records. Requiring at least one of fiscal year, text, institution, PI or agency keeps a run scoped and affordable.

Is there a limit on how many results I can page through?

NIH RePORTER itself caps pagination at roughly 15,000 records per search, regardless of the total match count. Narrow your filters (e.g. add a fiscal year) to search a large topic in slices.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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