🔬 NSF Research Grants Scraper

🚀 Scrape National Science Foundation awards with titles, funding amounts, abstracts, PI contacts, institutions, and program details. Filter by keyword, state, program, and date range.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-04-17

The National Science Foundation funds billions of dollars in research every year across science, engineering, and education. This Actor queries the NSF awards database and returns structured records with award IDs, titles, full abstracts, funding amounts, principal investigator names and emails, institution details, program names, and dates. You can filter by keyword, state, program name, and date range.

Universities tracking funding opportunities, researchers scouting who else is working in their field, policy analysts studying federal science spending, and grant writers looking for successful proposals all use this tool. Instead of clicking through individual award pages, you get a clean dataset in seconds.

Target	National Science Foundation Awards Database
Use Cases	Grant monitoring, research landscape analysis, federal spending tracking, collaboration discovery

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📋 What it does

• 🎓 Award metadata. Titles, IDs, full abstracts, and transaction types for every NSF-funded grant.
• 💰 Funding amounts. Estimated totals and obligated funds for each award.
• 👨‍🔬 PI information. Principal investigator names, email addresses, and institutional affiliations.
• 🏛️ Institution details. Awardee names, addresses, cities, states, and ZIP codes.
• 🔍 Flexible filtering. Search by keyword, state code, NSF program name, and start date range.

Each record includes 60+ fields covering the award details, PI information, institution data, funding amounts, performance location, program details, directorate codes, and dates.

💡 Why it matters: Manually searching the NSF website and copying award data into spreadsheets takes hours for even a few dozen grants. This Actor collects thousands of records with full abstracts and PI contacts in a single run.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
keyword	string	"artificial intelligence"	Search awards by topic. Examples: "machine learning", "climate change", "quantum computing".
awardeeState	string	-	Filter by 2-letter state code (e.g., CA, NY, TX).
fundProgram	string	-	Filter by NSF program name.
startDateStart	string	-	Awards starting after this date (MM/DD/YYYY format).
startDateEnd	string	-	Awards starting before this date (MM/DD/YYYY format).
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum awards to return. Free users limited to 10. Paid users up to 1,000,000.

Example: AI-related grants in California from 2024.

{
    "keyword": "artificial intelligence",
    "awardeeState": "CA",
    "startDateStart": "01/01/2024",
    "startDateEnd": "12/31/2024",
    "maxItems": 100
}

Example: All quantum computing grants.

{
    "keyword": "quantum computing",
    "maxItems": 200
}

⚠️ Good to Know: The NSF awards API is public and does not require authentication. Dates must use MM/DD/YYYY format. The scraper processes about 25 awards per second.

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📊 Output

Each record contains 60+ fields. Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🆔 id	string	"2401234"
📋 title	string	"CAREER: Trustworthy Machine Learning for Healthcare"
📝 abstractText	string	"This project investigates novel approaches..."
🏛️ awardeeName	string	"University of California-Berkeley"
📍 awardeeCity	string	"BERKELEY"
🗺️ awardeeStateCode	string	"CA"
💰 estimatedTotalAmt	string	"550000"
💵 fundsObligatedAmt	string	"110000"
👨‍🔬 pdPIName	string	"Jane Smith"
📧 piEmail	string	"jsmith@berkeley.edu"
📅 startDate	string	"06/01/2024"
📅 expDate	string	"05/31/2029"
🏷️ fundProgramName	string	"Robust Intelligence"
🏢 primaryProgram	string	"Robust Intelligence"
🕐 scrapedAt	string	"2026-04-09T12:00:00.000Z"

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🔬	60+ fields per record. Full award details including abstracts, PI contacts, and funding amounts.
🔍	Flexible filtering. Search by keyword, state, program, and date range.
👨‍🔬	PI contact data. Names and email addresses for principal investigators.
💰	Funding details. Both estimated totals and obligated amounts included.
⚡	Fast collection. About 25 awards per second.
📅	Schedule-ready. Set weekly runs to monitor new awards in your field.
📊	Multiple exports. Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

The NSF awards over $9 billion annually across 2,000+ programs, funding research at more than 2,000 institutions in all 50 states.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Setup
⭐ NSF Awards Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	All NSF awards	Live per run	⚡ 2 min
Manual NSF search	Free	Limited by time	Manual checks	🕐 Hours
NSF API integration	Free	Full access	Per request	🔧 2-4 hours
Third-party research databases	$500+/mo	Multi-agency	Weekly	📋 Onboarding

Pick this Actor when you want structured NSF award data without building your own API integration or managing pagination and rate limits.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the NSF Research Grants Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Enter a keyword, choose filters, and set your max items.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

🎓 University Research Offices Monitor new awards in your institution's focus areas Identify collaboration opportunities with funded PIs Track competitor institutions' funding portfolios Build grant application strategy based on funded topics	📊 Science Policy Analysis Study federal spending trends across programs and states Track funding distribution by institution and region Analyze which research topics receive the most funding Build time-series datasets of award volumes
📝 Grant Writing Research successful awards to model proposals after Find funded projects in your field with full abstracts Identify active NSF programs accepting your research area Study funded award amounts to calibrate budget requests	🏢 Technology and Industry Discover university research with commercial potential Identify emerging technology areas by funding trends Find principal investigators for partnership outreach Monitor grants that may produce licensable IP

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

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🔌 Automating NSF Awards Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Set a weekly run to catch new awards in your research area as they are announced.

🔌 Integrate with any app

NSF Awards Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications
• Airbyte - Pipe data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more data scrapers and tools.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) or any government agency. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available data is collected.