NIH RePORTER Scraper - Grants, PIs & Linked Publications

Extract NIH-funded research project records from the official RePORTER v2 API — no account or proxy required. Retrieve PI names, award amounts, activity codes, study sections, dates, active/terminated status, and optionally linked PubMed publication IDs.

What you get

Each output record corresponds to one NIH project award (one fiscal-year slice). Fields include:

Field	Description
project_num	Full NIH project number (e.g. 5R01CA123456-05)
core_project_num	Core project number — groups subprojects and multi-year awards
appl_id	Application ID
fiscal_year	NIH fiscal year
project_title	Project title
abstract_text	Full project abstract
phr_text	Public health relevance statement
activity_code	NIH activity code (R01, R21, K99, F31, P30, U54, …)
agency_ic_admin	Administering institute/center (NCI, NIAID, NHLBI, …)
award_amount	Total award amount (USD)
direct_cost_amt	Direct costs (USD)
indirect_cost_amt	Indirect costs (USD)
contact_pi_name	Contact PI name
principal_investigators	Full PI roster — each entry is a JSON string with full_name, profile_id, is_contact_pi
organization_name	Funded institution
org_state	US state of funded institution
is_active	Whether the project is currently active
arra_funded	Whether funded via ARRA (stimulus)
budget_start / budget_end	Budget period dates
project_start_date / project_end_date	Project period dates
full_study_section	NIH study section that reviewed the application
agency_ic_fundings	IC-level funding breakdown (FY:IC:amount strings)
spending_categories	NIH spending categories
linked_publication_pmids	PubMed IDs of linked publications (when Include Linked Publications is enabled)
project_detail_url	Direct link to the RePORTER project-details page

Filtering options

Input	Effect
Keyword / Text Search	Search across title, abstract, and terms
Fiscal Years	Limit to one or more NIH fiscal years (strongly recommended for large pulls)
Activity Codes	E.g. R01, R21, K99, F31, P30, U54
Administering Institute	E.g. NCI, NIAID, NHLBI, NIGMS
PI Names	Filter by PI last name
Organization Names	Filter by funded institution
Organization States	Filter by US state (e.g. CA, MA, NY)
Active Projects Only	Exclude terminated/closed awards
Newly Added Only	Only records recently added to RePORTER
Include Linked Publications	Fetch linked PubMed IDs for each project
Max Items	Cap on total records returned

API limits & pagination

The NIH RePORTER v2 API enforces a hard cap of 15,000 rows per search query (offset + page size cannot exceed 15,000). For large pulls, specify one or more Fiscal Years — the scraper runs a separate query per year so each slice stays under the cap. A single fiscal year typically contains 60,000–100,000 awards; the scraper fetches up to 15,000 per year and logs a warning when the cap is reached.

Use cases

• Grant landscape analysis — map NIH funding across institutes, activity codes, and institutions
• PI profiling — identify investigators and their award history
• Policy research — track ARRA, COVID-response, or newly-terminated awards
• Publication pipeline — link grants to downstream PubMed output
• Competitive intelligence — benchmark funding in a specific disease area or geography

Example output

{
  "project_num": "5R01CA123456-05",
  "core_project_num": "R01CA123456",
  "appl_id": 10987654,
  "fiscal_year": 2024,
  "project_title": "Novel Approaches to Targeted Cancer Therapy",
  "activity_code": "R01",
  "agency_ic_admin": "NCI",
  "award_amount": 512000,
  "direct_cost_amt": 350000,
  "indirect_cost_amt": 162000,
  "contact_pi_name": "DOE, JANE",
  "principal_investigators": [
    "{\"full_name\":\"Jane Doe\",\"profile_id\":12345,\"is_contact_pi\":true,\"title\":\"Prof.\"}"
  ],
  "organization_name": "STANFORD UNIVERSITY",
  "org_state": "CA",
  "is_active": true,
  "arra_funded": false,
  "budget_start": "2024-04-01",
  "budget_end": "2025-03-31",
  "project_start_date": "2020-04-01",
  "project_end_date": "2025-03-31",
  "full_study_section": "Tumor Microenvironment Study Section",
  "agency_ic_fundings": ["2024:NCI:512000"],
  "spending_categories": ["Cancer"],
  "linked_publication_pmids": [],
  "project_detail_url": "https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/R01CA123456",
  "status": "success"
}

Data source

All data is drawn from the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORTER) — a public database maintained by the National Institutes of Health. No authentication is required. The scraper calls the official v2 REST API and does not require a proxy.