ORCID Researcher Profiles Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

ORCID is the researcher-identity registry behind most of scholarly publishing — every ORCID iD carries a public profile with names, affiliations, and (optionally) employment history. The registry's own search API exposes a full Lucene query syntax, but no public tool surfaces it, and the pagination ceiling ORCID enforces for unauthenticated callers is easy to walk straight past without noticing. This Actor builds correct Lucene queries from plain fields, paginates honestly against ORCID's own limits, and — on request — fetches each researcher's employment history so a recruiting or research-ops list lands in one flat, ready-to-use dataset.

🔥 What we handle for you

• Builds correct ORCID Lucene queries from plain fields — no field-name guessing, no malformed clause syntax.
• Paginates expanded-search honestly against ORCID's own documented rows/start ceilings, re-checking num-found every page instead of trusting a stale first read.
• Retries transient 429/5xx responses with backoff, and never retries a documented 400 — it surfaces ORCID's own error message instead.

💡 Use cases

• Build a recruiting longlist of researchers at a target institution or department.
• Track a competitor lab's or department's current and former staff.
• Enrich a CRM or outreach list with verified ORCID iDs and public affiliation history.
• Compile an institutional or funder report of researchers matching a name/affiliation query.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in at least one search field — a name, an institution, an email, or a raw Lucene query.
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
givenNames	string	no	—	Given (first) name(s).
familyNames	string	no	—	Family (last) name(s).
creditName	string	no	—	Published/credit name, if different.
affiliationOrgName	string	no	'MIT'	Any affiliation (past or present) organization name.
currentInstitution	string	no	—	Current employer/institution name only.
email	string	no	—	Public email address on file.
freeText	string	no	—	Unprefixed broad-match search term.
rawQuery	string	no	—	Advanced: a raw ORCID Lucene query string. Overrides every other field when set.
maxResults	integer	no	200	Stop after this many profiles. ORCID caps effective reach at index ~11 000.
enrichEmployment	boolean	no	false	+1 HTTP call/row for full employment history at the same per-row price.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": true}	Apify Proxy settings.

At least one of givenNames, familyNames, creditName, affiliationOrgName, currentInstitution, email, freeText, or rawQuery must be set — an unconstrained search against 20M+ records is not supported.

Example input

{
  "affiliationOrgName": "MIT",
  "maxResults": 20,
  "enrichEmployment": false,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
orcid_id	string	ORCID iD, e.g. 0000-0002-4392-0814.
given_names	string	Given (first) name(s).
family_names	string	Family (last) name(s).
credit_name	string	Published/credit name, when different.
email	string	First public email on file, if any.
institutions	array	All affiliation organization names, order preserved.
current_institution	string	Current employer — only set when enrichEmployment is true.
current_role	string	Current role title — only set when enrichEmployment is true.
employment_history	array	Full employment history — only set when enrichEmployment is true.

Example output

{
  "orcid_id": "0000-0002-4392-0814",
  "given_names": "Donald",
  "family_names": "Smith",
  "credit_name": null,
  "email": null,
  "institutions": ["Guilford College", "MIT", "The University of Chicago"],
  "current_institution": "Guilford College",
  "current_role": "Professor",
  "employment_history": [
    {
      "organization_name": "Guilford College",
      "city": "Greensboro",
      "region": "NC",
      "country": "US",
      "role_title": "Professor",
      "department_name": "Physics",
      "start_date": "2005-08-01",
      "end_date": null,
      "is_current": true
    }
  ]
}

💰 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-emitted	$0.003	Per researcher profile written to the dataset

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $3.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• Only public ORCID data is fetched — no OAuth-scoped or /read-limited fields are requested or inferred.
• Unauthenticated ORCID reach is capped at start<=10 000 — a very broad query (e.g. a common surname with no other filter) may not reach every match. maxResults is capped at 11 000 for the same reason.
• enrichEmployment adds one HTTP call per row and increases run time; a researcher with no employment data on file simply returns empty enrichment fields, not an error.

❓ FAQ

Do I need an API key?

No. ORCID's public Search and /employments APIs are free and keyless.

Why does a broad query sometimes return fewer rows than expected?

ORCID caps unauthenticated pagination at index ~11 000. See Limitations above.

Can I write my own advanced query?

Yes — set rawQuery to a raw ORCID Lucene query string (e.g. family-name:Smith AND affiliation-org-name:MIT) and it overrides every structured field.

💬 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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