Google Scholar Scraper — Extract Academic Papers, Citations & Author Data

Extract academic paper metadata from Google Scholar including titles, authors, abstracts, citation counts, publication venues, PDF links, and publication years. Search by keyword, research topic, or author name. Returns structured JSON ready for literature reviews, bibliometric analysis, and AI research pipelines.

Export scraped data, run the scraper via API, schedule and monitor runs, or integrate with other tools.

Features

• 50 papers in ~10 seconds — lightning-fast API-based extraction
• Rich academic metadata — title, authors, abstract, venue, year, citation count, PDF link
• Citation tracking — exact citation counts for research impact measurement
• Year filtering — narrow results to a specific publication year range
• Author search — find all papers by a specific researcher (e.g., "Geoffrey Hinton")
• Multi-query support — search multiple keywords or authors in a single run
• Up to 500 results per query — deep search coverage with automatic pagination
• PDF direct links — when available, extract direct PDF download URLs
• Journal and conference data — venue name extracted from publication info
• Source type detection — classify results as PDF, book, or HTML

Use Cases

Use Case	Description
Literature reviews	Systematically collect papers for academic research and systematic reviews
Bibliometric analysis	Measure research impact, track citation trends, map collaboration networks
Competitor research	Monitor competitor publications and R&D directions
Grant writing	Find related work, citation context, and research gaps for proposals
AI knowledge graphs	Feed structured academic data to LLMs for summarization and classification
Content creation	Generate research-backed articles, newsletters, and educational materials

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQueries	string[]	["machine learning"]	Keywords or topics to search
authorUrls	string[]	[]	Author names to search (e.g., "Geoffrey Hinton")
maxResults	integer	20	Max papers per query (1–500)
yearFrom	integer	—	Filter papers from this year onward
yearTo	integer	—	Filter papers up to this year

Output

Each record represents one academic paper:

{
  "title": "Attention Is All You Need",
  "authors": ["Ashish Vaswani", "Noam Shazeer", "Niki Parmar"],
  "publicationInfo": "Advances in neural information processing systems, 2017",
  "abstract": "The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks...",
  "citationCount": 98432,
  "paperUrl": "https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/hash/...",
  "pdfUrl": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf",
  "sourceType": "PDF",
  "year": 2017,
  "citationsUrl": "https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=...",
  "relatedUrl": "https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=related:...",
  "scrapedAt": "2025-08-01T12:00:00.000Z",
  "searchQuery": "transformer attention mechanism"
}

API Usage

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_API_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('USERNAME/google-scholar-scraper').call({
  searchQueries: ['large language models', 'RLHF reinforcement learning'],
  maxResults: 50,
  yearFrom: 2022,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(`Found ${items.length} papers`);

Pricing

This actor charges per paper returned.

Volume	Estimated Cost
100 papers	~$0.10
1,000 papers	~$1.00
5,000 papers	~$5.00

FAQ

Q: Does this require a Google account or API key? No — the scraper uses Google Scholar's public data. No credentials needed.

Q: What is the citation count accuracy? Citation counts are extracted directly from Google Scholar's displayed counts. They match what you see on the website.

Q: Can I search for papers by a specific author? Yes — use the authorUrls field with the author's name (e.g., "Yann LeCun") or their Scholar profile URL.

Q: Does it extract full paper text? No — it extracts the abstract/snippet shown on Google Scholar. For full text, use the pdfUrl field when available.