Zenodo Research Records Scraper

Scrape Zenodo research records - datasets, papers, software, posters and more - straight from Zenodo's clean public JSON API. Get DOIs, titles, creators, keywords, licenses, download and view counts in structured JSON, CSV or Excel. No API key. No login. Datacenter-friendly.

Zenodo (operated by CERN) hosts millions of open-access research outputs. This actor turns its search API into a tidy dataset you can pipe into a spreadsheet, a database, or an AI pipeline.

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What it does

• Full-text search across Zenodo's entire corpus (titles, descriptions, creators, keywords).
• Returns one clean row per record with the fields researchers actually need.
• Handles pagination automatically up to your maxItems limit.
• Uses a real Chrome TLS fingerprint (curl_cffi) so it runs fine on datacenter proxies - no residential proxy required.

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "machine learning",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	Scraping mode (search).
query	string	Full-text query. Supports Elasticsearch syntax, e.g. title:"climate change".
maxItems	integer	Max records to scrape (default 100, max 1000).

Example output

{
  "id": "21427793",
  "doi": "10.5281/zenodo.21427793",
  "title": "A Machine Learning Dataset for Climate Modelling",
  "creators": ["Doe, Jane", "Smith, John"],
  "publication_date": "2026-07-01",
  "resource_type": "Dataset",
  "description": "A rich dataset for ML...",
  "keywords": ["machine learning", "climate"],
  "license": "cc-by-4.0",
  "downloads": 1234,
  "views": 5678,
  "url": "https://zenodo.org/records/21427793",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-18T12:00:00+00:00"
}

Every field is nullable - missing metadata simply comes back as null instead of breaking your run.

Pricing

Runs on Apify's pay-per-usage model. This actor is lightweight (512 MB, clean JSON API) so it costs roughly ~$1 per 1,000 records in platform usage - typically less. No third-party API fees, because Zenodo's API is free and key-less.

Use cases

• Open research discovery - monitor new datasets and software in your field.
• Dataset harvesting - build a catalogue of open datasets by topic for reuse.
• Bibliometrics - analyse download/view metrics, licenses and resource types at scale.
• AI training data - assemble metadata corpora of open-access research for RAG and model training.

Comparison

	This actor	Manual API scripting	Web scraping the HTML site
API key needed	No	No	No
WAF/403 handling	Built-in (Chrome impersonation)	You build it	Fragile
Structured, nullable output	Yes	You build it	You build it
Pagination	Automatic	Manual	Manual
Export CSV/Excel/JSON	Yes (Apify dataset)	No	No

Related actors

Building a research-metadata pipeline? Combine this with:

• DataCite Scraper
• Crossref Scraper
• DOAJ Scraper
• arXiv Scraper

Keywords: zenodo scraper, research datasets, open access, DOI scraper, bibliometrics, CERN, academic metadata, scholarly API, dataset harvesting, AI training data.

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Not affiliated with Zenodo or CERN. Respect Zenodo's terms of use and rate limits.