Figshare Research Data Scraper

Scrape research datasets, papers, figures and software from Figshare — no API key, no login, no account setup. Search millions of open research outputs by keyword or pull specific articles by ID, and get clean structured JSON with DOI, authors, ORCIDs, categories, tags, license, file counts, download URLs and citations.

Figshare hosts open research from thousands of institutions and publishers (Taylor & Francis, Frontiers, Karger, SAGE, and hundreds of university repositories). This actor turns that into a spreadsheet, a database, or a feed for your own tooling.

Features

• No API key required — runs on the public Figshare API v2 out of the box
• Two modes — keyword search across all of Figshare, or direct articles lookup by ID
• Optional detail enrichment — full abstract, author list, ORCIDs, license, files and citation
• DOI + citation ready — export straight into a reference manager or literature review
• File-level metadata — file count, total bytes, and direct download URLs
• Datacenter-proxy friendly — works without residential proxies, so runs stay cheap
• Permissive schema — every field nullable, nothing breaks on unusual records

Use cases

• Research data discovery — find every open dataset published on a topic
• Open science — monitor new deposits from a field, institution or publisher
• Literature review — build a DOI + citation table for a systematic review
• Datasets for ML — locate and download open training or benchmark data

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	search	search = keyword queries, articles = fetch specific IDs
queries	array	["climate model", "protein structure"]	Keyword queries for search mode
articleIds	array	–	Numeric Figshare article IDs for articles mode
enrichDetail	boolean	true	Fetch full detail per article (abstract, authors, files, license)
maxItems	integer	100	Hard cap on articles pushed (max 1000)

{
  "mode": "search",
  "queries": ["climate model", "single cell RNA-seq"],
  "enrichDetail": true,
  "maxItems": 200
}

Output

One dataset item per article:

{
  "article_id": 33103346,
  "title": "Supplementary file 1: Association of serum uric acid with vascular calcification",
  "doi": "10.3389/fendo.2026.1893598.s001",
  "description": "Background Vascular calcification (VC) is common among patients with T2DM...",
  "authors": ["Xinyu Li", "Taoyuan He", "Guosheng Li"],
  "orcids": ["0000-0002-1825-0097"],
  "categories": ["Cell Metabolism"],
  "tags": ["retrospective cohort study", "risk stratification", "serum uric acid"],
  "license": "CC BY 4.0",
  "version": 1,
  "item_type": "dataset",
  "published_date": "2026-07-28T12:32:26Z",
  "file_count": 1,
  "total_size_bytes": 1588077,
  "download_urls": ["https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/67060721"],
  "citation": "Li, Xinyu; He, Taoyuan (2026). Supplementary file 1. Frontiers. Dataset.",
  "url": "https://frontiersin.figshare.com/articles/dataset/.../33103346",
  "thumb": "https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/.../thumb.png",
  "source": "figshare",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T12:41:03Z"
}

All fields are nullable. Items published in institutional repositories may use a handle instead of a DOI, in which case doi is null.

Pricing

Roughly $0.5 per 1,000 articles on the Apify platform. Turning off enrichDetail roughly halves the request count for large keyword sweeps.

Related actors

• Zenodo Scraper — open research records from CERN's Zenodo
• OpenAlex Scraper — the open catalog of scholarly works
• Crossref Scraper — DOI metadata for published literature
• DataCite Scraper — DOI metadata for research data

Notes

This actor reads only publicly available metadata exposed by the official Figshare API. It does not download file contents — download_urls are direct links you can fetch yourself, subject to each item's license.