Google Scholar Author Metrics

Turn any Google Scholar profile into clean, structured data. Give this Actor an author's profile ID (or profile URL) and it returns their citation record straight from Google Scholar: total citations, recent citations, h-index, i10-index, the year-by-year citation histogram, the complete publication list, and the co-authors shown on the profile. One tidy row per author, ready for a spreadsheet, a dashboard, or a database.

If you have ever copied these numbers by hand for a grant report, a hiring committee, a literature review, or a league table, this Actor does it for you in seconds and keeps doing it on a schedule.

What you get

For every author you submit, one dataset record with:

• Profile — name, affiliation, verified email domain, homepage link, research interests, and profile photo.
• Headline metrics — citations (all-time and since the recent cut-off year Scholar shows), h-index (all-time and recent), and i10-index (all-time and recent).
• Citation histogram — citations per year, exactly as the bar chart on the profile shows them, as a simple [{ "year": 2019, "count": 700 }, ...] list you can plot directly.
• Publications — every paper on the profile: title, link, authors, venue, year, and its cited-by count. Paginated automatically, so you get the whole list, not just the first page.
• Co-authors — the co-authors listed on the profile, each with their name, affiliation, and their own profile link, so you can walk an entire research group.

Example output

{
  "author_id": "JicYPdAAAAAJ",
  "name": "Geoffrey Hinton",
  "affiliation": "Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto",
  "verified_email_domain": "cs.toronto.edu",
  "interests": ["machine learning", "neural networks", "artificial intelligence"],
  "citations_all": 900000,
  "citations_since": 500000,
  "h_index_all": 186,
  "h_index_since": 150,
  "i10_index_all": 483,
  "i10_index_since": 420,
  "since_year": 2019,
  "citations_per_year": [
    { "year": 2019, "count": 70000 }
  ],
  "publication_count": 100,
  "publications": [
    {
      "title": "Deep learning",
      "url": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&user=...",
      "authors": "Y LeCun, Y Bengio, G Hinton",
      "venue": "nature 521 (7553), 436-444, 2015",
      "year": 2015,
      "cited_by_count": 75000
    }
  ],
  "coauthors": [
    {
      "name": "Yann LeCun",
      "author_id": "WLN3QrAAAAAJ",
      "affiliation": "Chief AI Scientist, Facebook & Courant Institute, NYU",
      "profile_url": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WLN3QrAAAAAJ"
    }
  ],
  "profile_url": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JicYPdAAAAAJ&hl=en"
}

Input

Field	Type	Description
author_ids	array of strings	Required. Google Scholar author IDs — the user= value in a profile URL (for example JicYPdAAAAAJ). Add as many as you like; you get one row per author.
profile_urls	array of strings	Optional. Full scholar.google.com/citations?user=... URLs, used instead of or alongside author_ids. The ID is pulled out for you.
include_publications	boolean	Include the publication list. Default true. Turn off for a faster, metrics-only run.
max_publications	integer	Cap the publication list per author. 0 means all of them (paginated). Default 100.
include_coauthors	boolean	Include the co-authors listed on the profile. Default true.
hl	string	Interface language (en, de, fr, es, …). Affects labels, not the numbers. Default en.

Where do I find an author's ID?

Open the author's Google Scholar profile and look at the address bar. The ID is the value after user=:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JicYPdAAAAAJ&hl=en
                                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^

You can paste the whole URL into profile_urls and skip the copying.

Common uses

• Research office reporting — pull citations, h-index and i10-index for a whole department on a monthly schedule and drop them into a report.
• Hiring and tenure review — collect a candidate's metrics and full publication record without visiting a dozen profiles by hand.
• Collaborator mapping — start from one author, read the co-authors, then feed those IDs back in to map an entire group.
• Bibliometrics and rankings — build league tables or track how a metric moves over time by re-running on a schedule and storing each snapshot.
• Literature reviews — export an author's complete publication list with citation counts as a starting bibliography.

How it is billed

Pay per result: you are charged once for each author profile successfully returned. A run that finds nothing (a bad ID, or a temporary busy period) returns no billable results. There is a small fixed charge when a run starts. See the Pricing tab for the exact amounts.

Notes and limits

• One row per author. Submitting the same ID twice still returns it once.
• Publications are paginated for you. Large profiles are walked page by page up to your max_publications cap. A cap keeps big runs fast; set it to 0 when you truly need every paper.
• Numbers match the profile, including Scholar's "since" cut-off year, which Scholar moves forward over time; the since_year field tells you which year the recent columns refer to.
• Public profiles only. Only authors who have made their Scholar profile public are available; a private or non-existent profile is reported in the run's error record rather than silently dropped.
• Busy periods. Google Scholar sometimes throttles heavy traffic; when that happens the affected author is reported with a clear message and the rest of the run still completes. Keep batches sensible and schedule large jobs.

Tips

• Keep each run to a sensible batch of authors and schedule it, rather than submitting thousands at once.
• If you only need the headline numbers, set include_publications to false for a noticeably faster run.
• Store the whole output over time: with the citation histogram and the "since" year on every run, you can chart how an author's impact grows.