jobs.ac.uk Scraper — UK Academic & Research Jobs

Claude / Codex skill to describe and setup this actor: SKILL.md

Scrape current academic and research vacancies from jobs.ac.uk — the UK and Europe's leading academic job board.

What jobs.ac.uk data does this scraper extract?

Published postings follow nomad-agent-job-row-v1. The shared fields carry source identity, title and company, parsed locations, dates, the complete plain-text body when available, source markup when usable, and work type. Unavailable scalar facts are null; no parsed location is []. Source-only facts appear in versioned custom.data only when mapped there. See the Output example section for the exact dataset fields and diagnostic rows.

Note: jobs.ac.uk's search-results page shows title, department, employer, location, salary and dates only — no excerpt text. Turn on fetchDescriptions to also fetch each posting's detail page and get the full advert text in description. salaryMin/salaryMax/salaryCurrency/salaryPeriod are parsed from the displayed salary text.

How to scrape jobs.ac.uk with this Actor

1. Click Try for free / Run — no login to the target site, no cookies, no proxies to configure.
2. Adjust the input (keyword, filters, maxItems) or keep the defaults.
3. Run it and export the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it over the API.

Run it from your own code:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("nomad-agent/jobs-ac-uk-scraper").call(run_input={"maxItems": 50})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"], "—", item["company"], item["url"])

Or a single HTTP call that runs the Actor and returns items in one response:

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nomad-agent~jobs-ac-uk-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"maxItems": 50}'

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
keywords	array	(built-in defaults)	List of keyword queries to fan across. Each keyword is searched separately and results are merged (deduped by URL). Leave empty to use the built-in defaults spanning both humanities/social-science and STEM/health: social science, politics, psychology, humanities, international development, research, computer science, engineering, biology, medicine.
disciplines	array	(all)	Filter by discipline facet (server-side). See slug list below. Unknown values are ignored with a warning.
location	array	(all)	Filter by location region/city facet slug (server-side), e.g. england, scotland, greater-london, manchester, edinburgh. Values are lowercased/hyphenated automatically. An unrecognised slug returns 0 results.
studentshipType	array	(all)	Filter to studentships: phds, masters.
contractType	array	(all)	Filter by contract: permanent, fixed-term-contract, temporary.
hours	array	(all)	Filter by hours: full-time, part-time.
workplace	array	(all)	Filter by workplace: remote, hybrid, on-site. A single value also fills each record's isRemote/workplaceType.
employerSector	array	(all)	Filter by sector: universities-higher-education-institutions, further-education, science-and-research-organisations, public-sector, charity-not-for-profit, commercial-organisations.
employer	string	(none)	Keep only postings whose employer name contains this text (case-insensitive). Applied locally — jobs.ac.uk has no server-side employer-name filter.
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum number of job postings to return across all keyword queries. Each job returned is billed as one result event — see Pricing. Set to 0 for no limit.
pageSize	integer	25	How many results to request per keyword search (portal maximum is 25). Increase if you are running with a large maxItems and few keywords.
postedWithin	string	any	Keep only jobs published inside this window. Use any for no date filter, or a duration — 1h, 24h, 3d, 2w, 6m. Jobs the source published no date for are kept rather than dropped. Applied locally after fetching, since jobs.ac.uk has no server-side date filter — postedAt is parsed from each listing's Date Placed text. Replaces postedSince, still accepted for existing integrations.
fetchDescriptions	boolean	true	Also fetch each posting's detail page and return the full advert text in description. One extra page fetch per job; each enriched job bills one additional detail event (see Pricing). Turn off to return search-card fields only (search cards carry no description text of their own).
cacheTtlSeconds	integer	1800	(Advanced) How long to reuse a previous fetch instead of contacting jobs.ac.uk again, in seconds. Set to 0 to always fetch fresh data.

Discipline slugs. Academic: agriculture-food-and-veterinary, architecture-building-and-planning, biological-sciences, business-and-management-studies, computer-sciences, creative-arts-and-design, economics, education-studies-inc-tefl, engineering-and-technology, health-and-medical, historical-and-philosophical-studies, information-management-and-librarianship, languages-literature-and-culture, law, mathematics-and-statistics, media-and-communications, physical-and-environmental-sciences, politics-and-government, psychology, social-sciences-and-social-care, sport-and-leisure. Professional-services: administrative, estates-and-facilities-management, finance-and-procurement, fundraising-alumni-bids-and-grants, health-wellbeing-and-care, hospitality-retail-conferences-and-events, human-resources, international-activities, it-services, laboratory-clinical-and-technician, legal-compliance-and-policy, library-services-data-and-information-management, pr-marketing-sales-and-communication, project-management-and-consulting, senior-management, sports-and-leisure, student-services, sustainability, web-design-and-development.

Location filtering: jobs.ac.uk's free-text "within N miles" radius search relies on Google geocoding, so this Actor filters by the region/city facet (location) instead — pick a region (scotland, wales, greater-london) or city (manchester, oxford) slug.

Output example

Every row follows nomad-agent-job-row-v1, the one shape shared by all of this fleet's job Actors. A row carries every field; null means the source did not publish that fact, and locations: [] means no usable location was parsed from the posting. Nothing is guessed.

{
  "schemaVersion": "nomad-agent-job-row-v1",
  "recordType": "posting",
  "source": "jobs_ac_uk",
  "id": "a1b2c3",
  "url": "https://example.com/jobs_ac_uk/jobs/a1b2c3",
  "title": "Senior Backend Engineer",
  "company": "Example Company",
  "locations": [
    "Bilbao",
    "Spain"
  ],
  "postedAt": "2026-09-02T00:00:00Z",
  "deadline": "2026-10-15",
  "description": "The complete posting body as plain text, exactly as the source published it — never truncated.",
  "descriptionHtml": "<p>The complete posting body as the source's own markup.</p>",
  "workType": "remote",
  "custom": {
    "schemaId": "nomad-agent-job-custom-jobs-ac-uk-v1",
    "data": {
      "advertId": "…",
      "jobId": "…",
      "department": "…"
    }
  }
}

Field	Meaning
schemaVersion	Always "nomad-agent-job-row-v1".
recordType	"posting" for a job, "diagnostic" for a row reporting something about the run itself.
source	Which job source the posting came from, from the collector registry's vocabulary — not the Actor name.
id	Stable identifier for the posting within source.
url	Canonical public URL of the posting on the source site.
title	Job title exactly as the source publishes it, untruncated.
company	Employer name as published.
locations	Places the role is based, most specific first — e.g. ["Bilbao", "Spain"].
postedAt	When the source published the posting, ISO-8601 UTC (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ).
deadline	Closing date for applications as an ISO-8601 calendar date (YYYY-MM-DD).
description	The complete posting body as plain text — never truncated, never summarised.
descriptionHtml	The posting body as the source's own markup, preserving lists, headings and links.
workType	Working arrangement: "remote", "hybrid" or "onsite".
custom	Facts only this source publishes, as {"schemaId", "data"}.

A run also emits diagnostic rows — recordType: "diagnostic" with a warnings array — when it has something to report, such as a source returning nothing. They are never billed and are easy to filter out on recordType.

Integrations

Export the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel from the Console, pull it over the Apify API (including run-sync-get-dataset-items for a single blocking call), wire it into Make/Zapier/n8n, or drive it from an AI agent via the Apify MCP server.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.005 per Actor start and $0.002 per job returned (less on higher Apify subscription tiers, down to $0.0015), plus $0.002 per full description when fetchDescriptions is on. 100 jobs ≈ $0.41 by default (full descriptions included), or ≈ $0.21 with fetchDescriptions: false. No subscription, no rental — you pay only for what you fetch.

Use cases

• Academic job boards and PhD/postdoc alert bots
• University HR benchmarking
• Research-funding and hiring-trend analysis
• Career services for early-career researchers

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape jobs.ac.uk? This Actor reads only publicly available job postings — data any visitor can see without logging in. No personal data behind authentication is touched. Review the target site's terms and your local regulations for your specific use case.

Do I need an account on the target site? No. Postings are fetched from public pages/APIs — no login, cookies or session tokens.

How fresh is the data? Every run fetches live listings. Results are cached for cacheTtlSeconds (default 30 min, set 0 to always hit the source live).

How many jobs can I get? maxItems caps the run (set 0 where supported for no cap). Most sources paginate from newest to oldest.

Something broken or missing? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab — it is monitored and reliability fixes ship fast.

Is this Actor useful to you? A short review on the Store page genuinely helps other researchers and recruiters find it — it takes under a minute.

Is this Actor useful to you? A quick ⭐ review on the Actor's Reviews tab helps other academic-job seekers find it — and tells us what to build next.

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