Dryad Research Data Repository Scraper

Scrape curated research datasets from Dryad — the community-trusted, peer-curated data repository that is especially strong in ecology, evolution, and medicine. Pull authors, DOIs, abstracts, keywords, methods, licenses, related publications and file-level metadata into clean, structured JSON. No API key required.

Priced for volume at roughly ~$0.50 per 1,000 datasets — ideal for meta-analysis, systematic reviews and data-availability compliance at scale.

What it does

Dryad exposes a free, public REST API (https://datadryad.org/api/v2). This actor wraps it, handles the HAL/HATEOAS pagination for you, and normalises every record into a flat, analysis-ready schema.

• Browse or search the entire Dryad catalogue (70,000+ datasets)
• Look up explicit DOIs to enrich an existing list
• Compact, de-duplicated authors (name + affiliation + ORCID)
• Clean, HTML-stripped abstracts, methods and usage notes
• Keywords, field of science, license, storage size, related works and more

How it differs from Figshare / Zenodo (and DANDI / OSF)

This account also ships a Figshare scraper and a Zenodo scraper. They are not interchangeable — pick by repository:

Repository	Nature	Best for
Dryad (this actor)	Curated & peer-reviewed data publishing. Every dataset is human-checked by a curation team before release. Domain-skewed toward ecology, evolution, and biomedical/medical research, tightly linked to a related journal article.	High-quality, publication-linked biological/medical datasets; reproducibility & data-availability audits.
Figshare	General-purpose, self-deposit repository across all disciplines (figures, posters, datasets, media). Minimal curation.	Broad, cross-discipline discovery incl. non-dataset research outputs.
Zenodo	CERN-backed, general-purpose self-deposit; strong for software releases and long-tail research artifacts.	Software/code archives, DOIs for any output, EU/physics-leaning coverage.

In short: Dryad = curated, biology/medicine-heavy, article-linked data. Use Figshare/Zenodo for broad, self-deposited outputs. Related actors for the wider ecosystem: DANDI datasets scraper (neurophysiology) and OSF scraper (open-science projects).

Use cases

• Research data discovery — find every dataset on a topic across a curated corpus.
• Meta-analysis — assemble structured inputs (methods, sample notes, DOIs) for quantitative synthesis.
• Systematic reviews — screen data availability and link datasets back to primary articles.
• Data-availability compliance — verify that published papers actually deposited their data.

Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	datasets (browse/search) or dois (explicit lookup). Default datasets.
searchQuery	string	Optional full-text query (used in datasets mode via Dryad's /search endpoint).
dois	array	Dryad DOIs to resolve when mode='dois' (e.g. doi:10.5061/dryad.7rh4625).
maxItems	integer	Max datasets to scrape, 1–3000. Default 200.

Example input

{
  "mode": "datasets",
  "searchQuery": "coral reef",
  "maxItems": 500
}

{
  "mode": "dois",
  "dois": ["doi:10.5061/dryad.7rh4625"]
}

Output

Each item is a normalised dataset record. All fields are nullable.

{
  "type": "dataset",
  "doi": "doi:10.5061/dryad.7rh4625",
  "title": "Distinct predatory behaviors in scimitar- and dirk-toothed sabertooth cats",
  "authors": [{ "name": "Borja Figueirido", "affiliation": "Universidad de Malaga", "orcid": "0000-0003-2542-3977" }],
  "author_count": 4,
  "abstract": "Over the Cenozoic, large cat-like forms have convergently evolved ...",
  "keywords": ["Paleobiology", "Finite element analysis"],
  "field_of_science": "Evolutionary Biology",
  "methods": "...",
  "usage_notes": "...",
  "publication_date": "2023-05-10T00:00:00",
  "last_modified": "2023-06-01T00:00:00",
  "version_number": 1,
  "version_status": "submitted",
  "curation_status": "Published",
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/",
  "related_publication_issn": "0960-9822",
  "related_works": [{ "relationship": "primary_article", "identifier": "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.01.001" }],
  "visibility": "public",
  "sharing_link": "https://datadryad.org/share/...",
  "url": "https://datadryad.org/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.7rh4625",
  "source": "dryad",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-11T00:00:00+00:00"
}

Notes

• Data comes from Dryad's free public API — no key, no login.
• Please respect Dryad's terms and the individual dataset licenses when reusing content.