J-STAGE Scraper: 学術論文・引用検索 Research Leaderboard

See who actually leads a research topic, not just who published in it Search J-STAGE (科学技術情報発信・流通総合システム), Japan's national academic journal platform, and get a ranked Author Leaderboard and Journal Leaderboard built from the same results, plus full article data, abstracts, citation counts, and a citation-change tracker. No login required.

🏆 Author Leaderboard Ranks the real researchers publishing in your topic by paper count, with total and average citations once enrichment is on.

📚 Journal Leaderboard Ranks journals by paper count and average citation impact, so you know where a field actually gets published.

📄 Full article data Title in English and Japanese, authors, journal, DOI, ISSN, volume/issue, and abstract, with no login needed.

🔔 Citation-change tracking Re-check a saved list of articles and see exactly how each one's citation count moved.

Point this scraper at J-STAGE, Japan's national academic journal platform run by JST, and get back more than a list of matching papers: a ranked view of who leads that research topic and where it gets published.

🔍 What does this actor do?

J-STAGE indexes hundreds of thousands of Japanese academic articles across science, medicine, and engineering. Searching it by hand tells you what papers exist. It does not tell you who is the most active or most cited researcher in that topic, or which journals actually carry the field, so most people end up exporting a pile of rows and building that answer themselves in a spreadsheet.

This actor builds the answer for you. Every search computes an Author Leaderboard (who is publishing, how much, and where) and a Journal Leaderboard (which journals carry the topic and how well their articles are cited), both for free from the same rows the search already fetched. Turn on citation enrichment and both leaderboards also show total and average citations. The one other J-STAGE actor on Apify only returns a flat paper list with no abstract, no citation data, and no leaderboard at all.

💡 Who uses this?

• I run competitive intelligence for a Japanese R&D team. I need to know which researchers and labs are actually active in a technology area, not skim a page of paper titles and guess.
• I'm building a citation-tracking tool. I need structured author, journal, and citation data I can load straight into my own database, not raw pages to parse myself.
• I'm scoping a new research area. I want to see which authors and journals dominate a field before I read a single abstract.
• I'm tracking specific papers for citation growth. I want to know the moment a tracked paper's citation count moves, without re-running a full search every time.

🚀 How to use

STEP 1 Search a topic Enter a keyword. J-STAGE's own public index does the searching, no account needed.

STEP 2 Get the leaderboard See who's publishing and where, ranked automatically from the same results.

STEP 3 Track what changes Turn on citation tracking to watch specific papers, or the search itself, over time.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
query	string	Yes, unless trackCitationChanges is on	Keyword to search on J-STAGE. Powers the search itself and both leaderboard views.
maxResults	integer	No	How many articles to fetch, from 10 to 25. Default: 15.
dateFrom	string	No	Only include articles published in or after this year, for example 2020.
dateTo	string	No	Only include articles published in or before this year, for example 2024.
includeEnrichment	boolean	No	Fetch each article's abstract, cited-by count, and reference count, and fill in the leaderboard citation columns. Off by default.
onlyNewOrChanged	boolean	No	Only return articles not already returned by a previous run using the same stateName. Off by default.
stateName	string	No	Label for a saved search or citation tracker, so its history persists correctly across runs. Default: default.
resetState	boolean	No	Clear the saved state for stateName before this run. Off by default.
trackCitationChanges	boolean	No	Switch to citation-check mode: re-check citation counts for savedArticles instead of running a new search. Off by default.
savedArticles	array of objects	No	Articles to re-check when trackCitationChanges is on. Each entry needs a sourceUrl from a previous run's articleUrl, and an optional title.
proxyConfiguration	proxy	No	Keep the datacenter default; J-STAGE has no anti-bot protection to work around.

📊 Data table

Field	Type	Description
articleTitleEn	string | null	Article title in English.
articleTitleJa	string | null	Article title in Japanese.
authors	array of string	Author names as listed on J-STAGE.
journalNameEn	string | null	Journal name in English.
journalNameJa	string | null	Journal name in Japanese.
doi	string | null	Article DOI, when assigned.
issn	string | null	Journal ISSN.
volume	string | null	Journal volume.
number	string | null	Journal issue number.
pubYear	string | null	Publication year.
articleUrl	string	Direct link to the article on J-STAGE.
abstract	string | absent	Only present with includeEnrichment on.
citedByCount	integer | absent	Only present with includeEnrichment on.
referencesCount	integer | absent	Only present with includeEnrichment on.

Author Leaderboard view: authorName, paperCount, journals (which journals this author appears in), totalCitations and avgCitations (only present once enough of that author's papers went through citation enrichment).

Journal Leaderboard view: journalNameEn, journalNameJa, paperCount, avgCitations (only present once enough of that journal's papers went through citation enrichment).

You can download any view in JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel from the Output tab of any run.

📤 Sample output

{
    "articleTitleEn": "The relation between the cancer screening rate and the cancer mortality rate in Japan",
    "authors": ["Midori Yoshida", "Kazuya Kondo", "Toshiko Tada"],
    "journalNameEn": "The Journal of Medical Investigation",
    "doi": "10.2152/jmi.57.251",
    "issn": "1343-1420",
    "volume": "57",
    "number": "3,4",
    "pubYear": "2010",
    "articleUrl": "https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jmi/57/3,4/57_3,4_251/_article",
    "citedByCount": 18,
    "referencesCount": 32
}

💰 Pricing

Pricing is pay per event. You are charged only for articles actually written to your dataset and for each citation re-check performed. The Author and Journal Leaderboard views cost nothing extra, they are built from articles you already paid for. Empty runs cost nothing. There are no monthly subscriptions or minimum commitments.

Free plan runs are limited in items per run, runs per day, and a short wait between runs. These limits do not apply to paid plans.

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✨ Tips

• Read the leaderboard first. Sort authorLeaderboard by paperCount to find the most active researchers in a topic before you read a single abstract.
• Turn on enrichment for a real citation picture. Without it, both leaderboards are ranked by paper count alone. With it, totalCitations and avgCitations show who is not just prolific but influential.
• Narrow by year for a moving field. Use dateFrom/dateTo to compare who led a topic five years ago against who leads it now.
• Track a search over time. Turn on onlyNewOrChanged with a stateName to get only the articles that are new since your last run on that same search.
• Track specific papers, not a whole search. Turn on trackCitationChanges and list the papers you actually care about in savedArticles to watch their citation counts move.

❓ FAQ

学術論文をJ-STAGEで検索できますか? (Can I search academic papers on J-STAGE?)

Yes. Enter any keyword and this actor searches J-STAGE's own public article index and returns structured results, including English and Japanese titles, authors, and journal data.

How is this different from just searching J-STAGE myself?

A manual search gives you a page of paper titles. This actor also computes a ranked Author Leaderboard and Journal Leaderboard from the same results, so you see who leads the topic and where it's published without building that view yourself.

Do I need a J-STAGE account or API key?

No. J-STAGE's public search and article pages are open to anyone, and this actor never asks for a login.

When do totalCitations and avgCitations show up?

Only when includeEnrichment is on and enough of an author's or journal's papers in the current search went through citation enrichment. If the data isn't complete, those fields are left out rather than shown as a misleading partial average.

How does citation-change tracking work?

Set trackCitationChanges on and list article URLs in savedArticles. Each run re-checks the current citation count for every saved article and reports the change since the last check. The first check for an article establishes its starting count.

Is scraping J-STAGE legal?

This actor reads publicly available search results and article pages, the same pages any visitor can view without logging in. It never fetches PDF files, which J-STAGE's own rules restrict. You are responsible for complying with J-STAGE's terms of service and applicable laws. For questions or custom fields, contact the author at devanshtiwari365@gmail.com.

🔗 Other actors

• CNKI Scraper: 中国知网 Citations, Rankings & Academic Search ↗ - the equivalent citation-intelligence scraper for China's largest academic database.
• PubMed Scraper for RAG: Papers as Chunked JSON ↗ - pulls PubMed papers as structured, chunked content for feeding into a RAG pipeline.
• arXiv scraper for RAG: papers as chunked JSON ↗ - the same content-extraction approach for arXiv preprints.
• NIH & NSF grant monitor: research funding status ↗ - tracks the funding side of research, useful alongside a publication leaderboard.
• Japan Company Scraper: 4.5M+ gBizINFO Records ↗ - Japan's national company registry, useful for identifying the institutions behind a research topic's leading authors.