ORCID Scraper — Researcher Profiles, Works & Affiliations

$0.005 per record · Extract researcher profiles, publications, employment, and education history from ORCID — the global scholar identifier database with 18M+ registered researchers. No API key needed (uses ORCID Public API).

Built for academic intelligence, hiring & recruiting, collaboration discovery, grant tracking, and RAG/LLM corpora on research personas and careers.

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What You Get

• Search researchers — by keyword, affiliation, or name (e.g. "CRISPR MIT")
• Direct profile lookup — by ORCID iD (e.g. 0000-0002-1825-0097)
• Full publication list — works registered on ORCID with titles, DOIs, and years
• Employment history — past and current affiliations with dates
• Education history — degrees, institutions, graduation years
• ORCID-canonical iDs — resolvable permanent identifiers
• Structured JSON — ready for downstream pipelines
• Public API — free, no authentication required

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4 Use Cases (ready-to-run JSON inputs)

1. Academic recruiting — find talent by field + affiliation

{
  "searchQueries": ["machine learning MIT", "computational biology Stanford"],
  "maxResults": 30,
  "includeWorks": true,
  "includeEmployment": true,
  "maxWorks": 20
}

30 researchers per query with recent publications and affiliation history — perfect for technical recruiting or lab profiling.

2. Profile enrichment — full detail for specific researchers

{
  "orcidIds": ["0000-0002-1825-0097", "0000-0003-1453-0929"],
  "includeWorks": true,
  "maxWorks": 100,
  "includeEducation": true,
  "includeEmployment": true
}

Complete ORCID records for specific researchers — useful for building researcher cards, author pages, or CV-extraction pipelines.

3. Topic-based collaboration discovery

{
  "searchQueries": ["CRISPR gene editing", "mRNA vaccine"],
  "maxResults": 50,
  "includeWorks": true,
  "maxWorks": 10
}

Top 50 researchers per topic with recent works — seed data for mapping research communities or finding potential collaborators.

4. Lightweight directory build (no publications)

{
  "searchQueries": ["quantum computing IBM"],
  "maxResults": 100,
  "includeWorks": false,
  "includeEducation": false,
  "includeEmployment": true
}

Fast, cheap build of a researcher directory — only names + current affiliations, no publication fetch. Great for high-volume profiling.

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Input Schema

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQueries	string[]	[]	Keyword/affiliation/name searches
orcidIds	string[]	[]	Specific ORCID iDs to fetch
maxResults	integer	20	Max profiles per search query
includeWorks	boolean	true	Fetch publication list
maxWorks	integer	50	Max publications per researcher
includeEmployment	boolean	true	Fetch employment history
includeEducation	boolean	true	Fetch education history

Output (sample — profile)

{
  "orcidId": "0000-0002-1825-0097",
  "givenName": "Josiah",
  "familyName": "Carberry",
  "creditName": "Josiah S. Carberry",
  "biography": "Professor of psychoceramics, Brown University.",
  "country": "US",
  "keywords": ["psychoceramics", "ceramics", "psychology"],
  "works": [
    {
      "title": "Toward a Theory of Psychoceramics",
      "year": 2008,
      "type": "journal-article",
      "journalTitle": "J. Psychoceramics",
      "doi": "10.5555/12345678",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.5555/12345678"
    }
  ],
  "employment": [
    {
      "organization": "Brown University",
      "department": "Psychoceramics",
      "role": "Professor",
      "startYear": 2001,
      "endYear": null
    }
  ],
  "education": [
    {"organization": "Brown University", "degree": "Ph.D. Psychology", "endYear": 1929}
  ],
  "orcidUrl": "https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097"
}

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Pricing & Performance

• Pay-per-event: $0.005 per researcher profile
• Typical cost: $0.05 for 10 profiles, $0.50 for 100, $5 for 1,000
• Speed: ~10 profiles/second (rate-limit-safe against ORCID Public API)
• Free Apify tier: $5/month credit = ~1,000 profiles/month

Compare to commercial researcher databases (Scopus Author ID, Web of Science ResearcherID): ORCID is free, open, and researcher-maintained — you pay only for structured extraction.

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Integrations

• Zapier / Make / n8n — new researchers matching a query → Notion / Airtable / Slack
• Applicant Tracking Systems (Greenhouse / Lever) — enrich candidate profiles with ORCID records
• LangChain / LlamaIndex — RAG over researcher bios and publications
• Vector DBs (Pinecone / Weaviate / Qdrant) — embed bios + works for "similar researchers"
• Neo4j / Graphiti — researcher → affiliation → publication → DOI graph
• CRM (HubSpot / Salesforce) — enrich contact records with research output
• Python SDK

  from apify_client import ApifyClient
  client = ApifyClient("<APIFY_TOKEN>")
  run = client.actor("Helpermara/orcid-scraper").call(
      run_input={"searchQueries": ["protein folding DeepMind"], "maxResults": 50, "includeWorks": True, "maxWorks": 15}
  )
  for r in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
      print(r["orcidId"], r.get("creditName"), len(r.get("works", [])))
  

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FAQ

Do I need an ORCID API key? No — this actor uses the ORCID Public API (unauthenticated). If you need member-only fields, get an ORCID Member API token and fork the actor.

How current is the data? Live — every request hits pub.orcid.org/v3.0. ORCID data is researcher-maintained, so freshness depends on how often each scholar updates their profile.

What if a researcher has no ORCID? They simply won't appear. ORCID is opt-in — coverage is strongest in STEM and biomedical fields.

Can I get email / phone from ORCID? Only if the researcher marked those fields public — usually not. Use this actor for academic affiliation + work history, not private contact details.

What's the difference vs semantic-scholar-scraper? Semantic Scholar is paper-centric with citations. ORCID is researcher-centric with career history (employment, education, opt-in works). Complementary pair.

Rate limits? ORCID Public API is generous but not unlimited. The actor paces requests conservatively (200 ms between calls).

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Keywords

orcid scraper, orcid api, researcher profiles, academic profiles, scholar id, researcher search, academic recruiting, research cv, researcher directory, affiliation data, employment history, publication list, scholar database, academic intelligence, research personas, researcher discovery, collaboration mapping, science talent, researcher enrichment, orcid public api

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Companions (cross-promo)

• dblp-scraper — CS bibliography
• semantic-scholar-scraper — papers + citations
• crossref-scraper — DOI metadata
• zenodo-scraper — research datasets

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Changelog

• 2026-04-24 — Extended README with use cases, integrations, and FAQ
• 2026-03 — Initial release: search by keyword + direct ORCID iD lookup, works/employment/education