# Research Paper Scraper — Papers, Abstracts & Citations (`hichemdev/openalex-scraper`) Actor

Scrape academic papers from OpenAlex: title, full reconstructed abstract, authors, institutions, journal, publisher, DOI, publication date, citation count, field-weighted impact, topics, open-access status and PDF links. Filter by keyword, year, DOI, citations, country or type. No API key.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/hichemdev/openalex-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [Hichem Ben Moussa](https://apify.com/hichemdev) (community)
- **Categories:** Developer tools, Business, Other
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $2.00 / 1,000 papers

This Actor is paid per event and usage. You are charged both the fixed price for specific events and for Apify platform usage.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.

Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md.

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.

Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run.

For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below.

Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`).

# README

## Research Paper Scraper — OpenAlex Papers, Abstracts & Citations

Scrape **academic papers with full abstracts, authors, institutions and citation counts** from OpenAlex, the open catalogue of over **250 million** scholarly works — an open replacement for Scopus and Web of Science.

Search by keyword, year, DOI, citation threshold, country, language or publication type, then export to JSON, CSV or Excel.

No API key required.

### What you get

| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| `title` | Paper title |
| `abstract` | **Full abstract text**, reconstructed for you (see below) |
| `doi` | DOI, e.g. `10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2` |
| `authors` | Every author, in order |
| `firstAuthor`, `correspondingAuthors` | The names that matter for outreach |
| `institutions` | Affiliated universities, labs and companies |
| `institutionCountries` | Author country codes |
| `journal`, `publisher`, `issn` | Venue |
| `volume`, `issue`, `pages` | Citation details |
| `publicationYear`, `publicationDate` | When it appeared |
| `citedByCount` | Times cited |
| `fwci` | Field-weighted citation impact — citations normalised against the field average |
| `citationNormalizedPercentile` | Where it ranks in its field |
| `referencedWorksCount` | Size of its bibliography |
| `isOpenAccess`, `oaStatus`, `pdfUrl` | Free full-text availability and a direct PDF link |
| `topics`, `primaryField`, `keywords` | Subject classification |
| `isRetracted` | Retraction flag |
| `type`, `language` | Publication type and language |
| `landingPageUrl`, `url` | Links |

### The abstract is the point

OpenAlex stores abstracts as an *inverted index* — a map of every word to the positions it occupies — which is unusable as text. This actor **rebuilds the readable abstract** for every paper, so you get prose you can feed straight into a summariser, an embedding model or a literature review.

### Example input

```json
{
  "searchTerm": "CRISPR gene editing",
  "fromPublicationDate": "2024-01-01",
  "minCitations": 10,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "sortBy": "cited_by_count:desc",
  "maxWorks": 200
}
```

Or fetch one exact paper:

```json
{ "doi": "10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2" }
```

Or survey a country's output in a field:

```json
{
  "searchTerm": "solid state battery",
  "institutionCountry": "cn",
  "publicationYear": "2025",
  "sortBy": "cited_by_count:desc"
}
```

### Example output

```json
{
  "id": "W2741809807",
  "doi": "10.7717/peerj.4375",
  "title": "The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles",
  "abstract": "Despite growing interest in Open Access to scholarly literature...",
  "publicationYear": 2018,
  "journal": "PeerJ",
  "firstAuthor": "Heather Piwowar",
  "institutions": ["Impactstory", "University of Pittsburgh"],
  "institutionCountries": ["us", "ca"],
  "citedByCount": 1243,
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "oaStatus": "gold",
  "pdfUrl": "https://peerj.com/articles/4375.pdf",
  "primaryField": "Social Sciences"
}
```

### Who uses this

- **Researchers and PhD students** — systematic literature reviews with abstracts included, in minutes instead of weeks
- **R\&D and competitive intelligence** — who is publishing on your technology, at which company or lab, and how fast the field is growing
- **Tech transfer and VC scouting** — find highly cited recent work and the institutions behind it before it becomes a startup
- **Bibliometrics and research offices** — citation impact and FWCI by department, country or year
- **AI and ML teams** — build a training or RAG corpus of real abstracts with clean metadata and open-access PDF links
- **Recruiters in deep tech** — identify corresponding authors working on a specific method

### Rate limits and the polite pool

OpenAlex asks API users to identify themselves with a contact address, and gives identified traffic a much more reliable service. The actor always sends one, but you can put **your own e-mail** in the *Contact e-mail* field to run in OpenAlex's polite pool under your own identity — recommended for large pulls. The actor also backs off and retries automatically on rate limits.

### Pricing

Pay per result. Each paper returned counts as one result.

### Notes

- Data comes from OpenAlex (OurResearch), released under CC0.
- A minority of records have no abstract in OpenAlex at all — usually older papers or ones whose publisher does not release abstracts. Those come back with `abstract: null` rather than a partial string.
- `sortBy: "Best match"` requires a search term; when you filter without one, the actor automatically sorts by citations instead, because relevance has no meaning on an unsearched filter.
- Sorting by citations favours older papers, which have had longer to accumulate them. Use `fwci` or `citationNormalizedPercentile` to compare impact fairly across years and fields.
- This is an unofficial actor and is not affiliated with OpenAlex or OurResearch.

# Actor input Schema

## `searchTerm` (type: `string`):

Words to search titles, abstracts and full text for, e.g. CRISPR gene editing, large language models, microplastics.

## `doi` (type: `string`):

Fetch one exact paper by DOI, e.g. 10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2.

## `publicationYear` (type: `string`):

Exact year, e.g. 2024. Use the date range below for anything finer.

## `fromPublicationDate` (type: `string`):

YYYY-MM-DD.

## `toPublicationDate` (type: `string`):

YYYY-MM-DD.

## `minCitations` (type: `integer`):

Keep only papers cited at least this many times.

## `openAccessOnly` (type: `boolean`):

Keep only papers with a free full text available.

## `workType` (type: `string`):

Restrict to one publication type.

## `language` (type: `string`):

Two-letter language code, e.g. en, de, zh.

## `institutionCountry` (type: `string`):

Two-letter country code of an author institution, e.g. us, gb, cn.

## `sortBy` (type: `string`):

Result order. Relevance needs a search term; without one the actor sorts by citations.

## `contactEmail` (type: `string`):

OpenAlex gives faster, more reliable service to requests that identify a contact address. Supplying your own e-mail puts your runs in their polite pool.

## `maxWorks` (type: `integer`):

Stop after this many papers.

## `proxyConfiguration` (type: `object`):

Optional. A proxy is not required for this actor.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "searchTerm": "large language models",
  "openAccessOnly": false,
  "workType": "",
  "sortBy": "relevance_score:desc",
  "maxWorks": 50,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}
```

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

All scraped items as JSON.

## `overview` (type: `string`):

Browse results in the Apify Console.

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "searchTerm": "large language models",
    "maxWorks": 50
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("hichemdev/openalex-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = {
    "searchTerm": "large language models",
    "maxWorks": 50,
}

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("hichemdev/openalex-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}")
for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "searchTerm": "large language models",
  "maxWorks": 50
}' |
apify call hichemdev/openalex-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "type": "http",
            "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,hichemdev/openalex-scraper"
        }
    }
}
```

The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN>` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations).

## OpenAPI specification

Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/0dtDmXkbeqbMzsjwo/builds/ybOP7C8wIwNVuXEYj/openapi.json