🔬 NASA Reports Scraper

🚀 Collect technical reports from NASA's NTRS database in minutes. Filter by author, center, subject, document type, and date range. No coding, no API keys required.

NASA's Technical Reports Server (NTRS) hosts hundreds of thousands of scientific papers, conference proceedings, technical memoranda, and research reports. This scraper connects directly to the NTRS API and returns structured data including titles, authors, abstracts, publication dates, download links, subject categories, and NASA center information. Whether you need 10 reports or 500,000, the scraper handles pagination, filtering, and data formatting automatically.

Researchers, engineers, and data analysts use this actor to build literature databases, track research output from specific NASA centers, monitor publications in their field, and compile bibliographies. Instead of manually browsing NTRS and downloading metadata one record at a time, you get clean, structured data exported as JSON, CSV, or Excel. Every record includes the full abstract, all author names, NASA center, document type, subject categories, keywords, and direct PDF download links.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Use Cases
Aerospace researchers	Track publications in specific research areas
Graduate students	Build literature reviews for dissertations
Defense contractors	Monitor NASA research relevant to proposals
Science journalists	Find source material for space and aviation stories
University libraries	Catalog NASA reports in institutional repositories
Data analysts	Analyze publication trends across NASA centers

📋 What the NASA Reports Scraper does

• 🔍 Keyword search across all NASA technical reports and publications
• 👤 Author filtering to find all publications by a specific researcher
• 🏢 Center filtering across 14 NASA centers including Ames, Goddard, and JPL
• 📄 Document type selection for technical memoranda, conference papers, videos, and more
• 📅 Date range filtering by publication date or date acquired
• 🏷️ Subject category filtering for focused research area collection

The scraper sends your query to NASA's NTRS API, retrieves matching records, and extracts full metadata for each report. Results include the complete abstract, author list, NASA center, subject categories, keywords, document type, distribution status, report numbers, funding numbers, and direct download links. Each record is timestamped so you know when it was collected.

💡 Why it matters: NTRS contains NASA's full body of published research, but browsing and exporting is slow and limited to small batches. This scraper automates collection and delivers structured data ready for analysis, citation databases, or research tracking.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: _meta, abstract, authorAffiliations, authors, center, centers, citationId, copyright, created, detailsUrl, disseminated, distribution, distributionDate, downloads, downloadsAvailable, exportControl, fullTextUrl, fundingNumbers, imageUrls, index, isLessonsLearned, keywords, meetings, modified, onlyAbstract, otherReportNumbers, pdfUrl, publicationDate, publications, related, reportNumbers, scrapedTimestamp, sensitiveInformation, status, stiType, stiTypeDetails, subjectCategories, submittedDate, technicalReviewType, title. All 40 field names come from a real production run, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: Use search filters (not a Start URL) for best results. The NASA NTRS uses a POST API internally, so direct URL scraping has limited support. Combine multiple filters to narrow results to exactly what you need.

🚀 How to use

1. Create an Apify account - Sign up free with $5 credit
2. Open the NASA Reports Scraper - Navigate to the actor page on Apify
3. Enter your search criteria - Type a keyword, author name, or select filters
4. Configure filters - Set center, document type, date range, and sort order
5. Click Start - The actor collects matching reports and delivers structured data

⏱️ A typical run with 10 reports completes in under 1 minute.

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💡 Pro Tip: Combine the NASA Reports Scraper with the Crossref Scraper to match NASA publications with their DOI records and track citation impact.

Disclaimer: This actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to NASA or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It accesses publicly available data through NASA's Technical Reports Server. Use responsibly and in accordance with applicable terms of service.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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