Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper

🚀 Collect detailed researcher profiles from Semantic Scholar. Extract academic profiles including citation metrics, publication history, institutional affiliations, and research impact data - all without any technical setup.

Whether you're evaluating researcher credentials, monitoring scientific trends, or building academic databases, this tool delivers structured, ready-to-analyze data in seconds. Perfect for research teams, investors vetting technical founders, and institutions tracking academic progress.

📊 What Does It Do?

This tool searches Semantic Scholar's database of over 220 million papers and delivers comprehensive researcher profiles, including:

• 🧑‍🔬 Name and Profile URL - Researcher's full name and Semantic Scholar profile link for easy reference
• 🔑 Author ID - Direct lookup using Semantic Scholar author identifiers for precise matching
• 🌐 External IDs - Cross-reference identifiers (DBLP, etc.) for linking to other academic databases
• 📈 H-Index - Scholarly impact metric showing citation influence and research contribution
• 📊 Citation Count - Total citations across all publications to assess research reach
• 📝 Paper Count - Total number of publications for understanding research productivity
• 🏛️ Affiliations - Current and past institutional connections for mapping research networks
• 🔗 Homepage - Researcher's personal or institutional website link
• 📚 Papers Array - Optional: Full publication list with titles, years, citation counts, venues, and open access PDFs
• ⏰ Scraped Timestamp - Exact collection time for tracking data freshness

Business Value: Make faster decisions about researcher credentials, track academic trends, and build comprehensive research databases without manual profile-by-profile work.

🔧 Input

The tool accepts either an author name query or a list of author IDs. All fields are optional.

• Author Search Query - Search by researcher name (e.g., "Yoshua Bengio"). Supports partial names and returns all matching profiles
• Author IDs - Direct lookup using Semantic Scholar author identifiers. Provide a list of IDs for precise targeting
• Max Items - Limit results (default: 10). Free users are capped at 100. Paid users can request up to 1,000,000
• Include Papers - Optional: Fetch each author's complete publication list. Increases runtime

Example - Search by name:

{
  "query": "Yoshua Bengio",
  "maxItems": 10,
  "includePapers": false
}

Example - Direct ID lookup:

{
  "authorIds": ["1751762", "1865800402"],
  "maxItems": 5,
  "includePapers": true
}

💡 Pro Tip: Use the Author Search Query for discovery, and Author IDs for precise lookups when you already know who you're looking for.

📊 Output

After the run completes, you get a clean dataset with all available researcher data. Download as CSV, JSON, or Excel.

Here's an example of what you get for each researcher:

{
  "name": "Yoshua Bengio",
  "url": "https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1751762",
  "authorId": "1751762",
  "externalIds": { "DBLP": ["Yoshua Bengio"] },
  "affiliations": [],
  "homepage": null,
  "paperCount": 816,
  "citationCount": 560896,
  "hIndex": 212,
  "papers": [
    {
      "paperId": "0fdff0a9a42dfb00f1b99d9025be3759b8fe6fd2",
      "title": "AI and Catastrophic Risk",
      "year": 2023,
      "citationCount": 27,
      "venue": "Journal of Democracy",
      "publicationTypes": ["JournalArticle", "Review"],
      "openAccessPdf": null,
      "externalIds": { "DOI": "10.1353/jod.2023.a907692", "CorpusId": 262191335 }
    }
  ],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-02-23T21:36:26.501Z"
}

Key fields explained:

Field	What It Means
hIndex	Hirsch index measuring both publication volume and citation impact
citationCount	Total citations across all of the researcher's work
paperCount	Total number of publications authored
externalIds	Identifiers for cross-referencing with other databases like DBLP
papers	Full publication list (only when "Include Papers" is enabled)

Download Options: CSV, Excel, or JSON directly from the Apify platform.

🚀 How to Use

Extracting researcher profiles takes less than 5 minutes. No technical skills required.

1. Sign Up - Create a free account w/ $5 credit
2. Find the Actor - Search for "Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper" in the Apify marketplace
3. Set Your Input - Enter researcher names or author IDs, and choose your max items limit
4. Run - Click "Start" and wait for results (typically completes within seconds to minutes)
5. Download Data - Export as CSV, JSON, or Excel from the results panel

Your researcher data is ready to analyze, compare, or integrate into your workflow.

🎯 Business Use Cases

Academic Researchers and Librarians

• Build comprehensive profiles of peers and competitors in your research field
• Track citation trends and h-index changes over time to measure research impact
• Discover new collaborators and research networks within your discipline

University Administration and Grants Management

• Evaluate researcher credentials and publication records during hiring or promotion reviews
• Assess institutional research output and impact metrics for annual reporting
• Verify researcher qualifications and publication claims in grant applications

Investment Firms and Venture Capital

• Evaluate technical founders and advisory board members' academic credentials
• Identify AI researchers with significant publication records and citation influence
• Track researcher transitions from academia to industry for talent scouting

Corporate R&D and Innovation Teams

• Scout academic talent for research partnership and recruitment opportunities
• Monitor publication activity of researchers your company collaborates with
• Identify emerging research trends by analyzing publication patterns of leading researchers

❓ FAQ

How does this work? The tool searches Semantic Scholar for researcher profiles matching your query or author IDs. It collects their h-index, citation metrics, affiliations, and optionally their full publication list. Results arrive in seconds and are ready to download.

How accurate is the data? Data comes directly from Semantic Scholar, an academic search engine covering over 220 million papers. Researchers can update their own profiles on Semantic Scholar to ensure accuracy.

Can I search by partial names? Yes. The search field accepts partial names and returns all matching profiles. If you know an author's exact ID, use the "Author IDs" field for more precise results.

What happens if I include papers? The tool fetches each author's complete publication list including titles, publication years, citation counts, venues, and open access links. This takes longer but gives you comprehensive research output data.

What's the difference between maxItems and free/paid limits? Free users are automatically limited to 100 profiles per run. Paid users can request up to 1,000,000. The maxItems field lets you set a custom limit within your account tier.

Can I schedule regular runs? Yes. Use Apify's scheduler to run this actor on a daily, weekly, or custom schedule. This is useful for tracking how h-indices and citation counts change over time for researchers you're monitoring.

🔌 Integrate Semantic Scholar Scraper with any app

Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform.

These include:

• Make - Automate workflows
• Zapier - Connect 5000+ apps
• Slack - Get notifications
• Airbyte - Data pipelines
• GitHub - Version control integration
• Google Drive - Export to spreadsheets
• and much more.

Alternatively, you can use webhooks to carry out an action whenever an event occurs, e.g. get a notification whenever the scraper successfully finishes a run.

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💡 Pro Tip: Browse our complete collection of data collection actors to find the perfect tool for your business needs.

Need Help?

Check the FAQ section above for answers to common questions. For platform help, visit the Apify support page. If you need a custom data solution, reach out to the ParseForge team at https://tally.so/r/BzdKgA

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⚠️ Disclaimer: This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Semantic Scholar or any of its subsidiaries. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.