🔬 Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-05

Collect academic researcher profiles from Semantic Scholar with h-index, citation counts, affiliations, and publication data - without coding. Perfect for research teams, librarians, and competitive intelligence analysts monitoring researcher trends and building researcher databases.

The Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper collects up to 1,000,000 researcher profiles with h-index, citations, and affiliations - simple to use, no setup required.

✨ What Does It Do

• 📊 H-Index - Understand researcher impact with the h-index metric
• 📚 Citation Count - Track total citations across a researcher's entire body of work
• 📝 Paper Count - See how many publications each researcher has published
• 🏢 Affiliations - Discover which universities or institutions researchers are associated with
• 📖 Papers List - Get full publication data including titles, years, venues, and citation counts
• 🔗 External IDs - Capture identifiers like ORCID, MAG ID, and other research databases
• 🌐 Researcher Homepage - Extract links to personal websites and research profiles

🔧 Input

• Author Search Query - Search for researchers by name (e.g. "Yoshua Bengio"). Use this or Author IDs, not both
• Author IDs - Direct lookup using Semantic Scholar author IDs for precise targeting
• Max Items - Free users limited to 100, paid users up to 1,000,000 results
• Include Papers - Enable to collect each researcher's complete publication list (increases runtime)

Example input:

{
  "query": "Yoshua Bengio",
  "maxItems": 50,
  "includePapers": true
}

📊 Output

Each researcher profile includes up to 12 data fields. Download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

👤 Researcher Name	🔗 Profile URL	🎓 Author ID
📊 H-Index	📚 Citation Count	📈 Paper Count
🏢 Affiliations	🌐 Homepage	📖 Publication List
🔗 External IDs	📅 Scraped Date	⚠️ Error Message

💎 Why Choose the Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper?

Feature	Our Actor	Similar Tools
Search researchers by name	✔️	❌
Direct lookup by author ID	✔️	❌
H-index and citation metrics	✔️	Partial
Complete affiliation data	✔️	❌
Full publication list included	✔️	❌
Automatic pagination	✔️	❌
No authentication setup required	✔️	❌
Free tier supports 100 results	✔️	❌
Paid users up to 1,000,000 results	✔️	❌
Retry logic for rate limits	✔️	❌
Export as JSON, CSV, Excel	✔️	✔️

📋 How to Use

No technical skills required. Follow these simple steps:

1. Sign Up: Create a free account with $5 credit
2. Find the Tool: Search for "Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper" in the Apify Store and configure your input
3. Run It: Click "Start" and watch your results appear

That's it. No coding, no setup, no complicated configuration. Now you can export your data in CSV, Excel, or JSON format.

🎯 Business Use Cases

• 📊 Research Librarian - Monitor h-index trends for faculty members to identify top performers for promotion decisions
• 💼 Grant Program Manager - Build researcher databases by institution to target high-impact scientists for funding campaigns
• 🔬 Competitive Intelligence Analyst - Track citation metrics for competitor research teams to benchmark innovation capacity

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🎯	Built for the job. Scoped specifically to this data source so you skip the parser engineering entirely.
🔖	Structured output. Clean, typed fields ready for analysis, dashboards, or downstream pipelines.
⚡	Fast. Optimized request patterns return results in seconds, not minutes.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls live data, so the dataset reflects the source as of run time.
🌐	No infra to manage. Apify handles proxies, retries, scaling, scheduling, and storage.
🛡️	Reliable. Battle-tested across many runs and edge cases, with graceful error handling.
🚫	No code required. Configure in the UI, run from CLI, schedule via cron, or call from any language with the Apify SDK.

📊 Production-grade structured data without the engineering overhead of building and maintaining your own scraper.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	Full source coverage	Live per run	Source-native filters supported	⚡ 2 min
Build your own scraper	Engineering hours	Full once built	Whenever you maintain it	Custom code	🐢 Days to weeks
Paid managed APIs	$$$ monthly	Vendor-defined	Live	Vendor-defined	⏳ Hours
Third-party data dumps	Varies	Subset, often stale	Periodic	None	🕒 Variable

Pick this Actor when you want broad coverage, server-side filtering, and no pipeline maintenance.

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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 Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Configure the input fields in the form (or paste a JSON), then set maxItems.
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

📊 Data & Analytics Build trend reports and dashboards from live source data Feed BI tools, warehouses, and ML pipelines with structured records Run periodic snapshots to track changes over time Compare segments, regions, or categories with consistent fields	🏢 Operations & Strategy Monitor competitor moves, pricing, and inventory shifts Build internal directories and lookup tools backed by current data Power workflows that depend on fresh source records Cut manual data-gathering time from hours to minutes
🎯 Marketing & Growth Identify market opportunities and trending topics Research target audiences and customer personas at scale Power lead-generation pipelines with verified records Track sentiment, reviews, or social signals over time	🛠️ Engineering & Product Prototype features that need real-world data without owning a crawler Replace fragile in-house scrapers with a managed Actor Wire datasets into your apps via the Apify API or webhooks Skip the proxy, retry, and parsing maintenance entirely

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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

💰 How much does it cost?

Apify gives you $5 in free monthly credits on the Apify Free plan, enough to test Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper and pull a real sample dataset. For ongoing usage:

• Starter plan ($49/month) — Recommended for individuals running Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper regularly. Includes higher concurrency and larger datasets.
• Scale plan ($499/month) — Recommended for teams running Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper at production scale.

Pay-Per-Event pricing means you only pay for what you actually use. Failed runs are never charged. See the Pricing tab on this Actor's page for exact event prices.

💡 Tips for using Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper

• Start with a small maxItems (3-10) to validate output format before running larger jobs.
• Use Apify Schedules to run Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper on a recurring basis and keep your dataset fresh.
• Export via Integrations: Apify connects to Google Sheets, Airbyte, Make, Zapier, and direct webhooks — pipe your data anywhere.
• Monitor with webhooks: trigger downstream workflows the moment a run finishes.
• Re-run failed items: if any individual records error out, re-run with their inputs only. Failed events are not charged.

⚖️ Is it legal to use Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper?

Yes. Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper only collects publicly available data. Web scraping public data has been confirmed as legal by US courts (see hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn) and is widely used for research, market analysis, and business intelligence.

However, you are responsible for:

• Respecting the source website's Terms of Service.
• Complying with GDPR, CCPA, and other applicable data-protection laws when personal data is involved.
• Not republishing copyrighted content without permission.

If you have specific compliance concerns, consult your legal team. See the Apify legal docs for more.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🔌 Integrate with any app

Semantic Scholar Author Profiles Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

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

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh data into your product backend, or alert your team in Slack.

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🚀 Ready to Start?

Create a free account with $5 credit and collect your first 100 results for free. No coding, no setup.

🆘 Need Help?

• Check the FAQ section above for common questions
• Visit the Apify support page for documentation and tutorials
• Contact us to request a new scraper, propose a custom project, or report an issue at Tally contact form

⚠️ 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.

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