EU Academic Jobs: PhD, Postdoc & Research Positions

Find every PhD position, postdoc job, and research vacancy in Europe in one run. This actor aggregates 5 major academic job portals — EURES, DAAD PhDGermany, EuroScienceJobs, UniversityPositions, and INOMICS — into a single normalized, deduplicated dataset (JSON / CSV / Excel / XML). Keyword auto-translation finds local-language postings an English-only search misses, and academic-only mode drops the corporate noise that EURES mixes into general "research" searches.

Manually checking five portals every week takes hours. This actor does it in minutes — and with a scheduled weekly run in incremental mode, you only ever see new postings, for about $0.20/week.

Who is this for?

• PhD & postdoc job seekers — set up a weekly scheduled run with incrementalMode: true and only see new positions in your field and countries
• Research groups — monitor hiring across Germany, Netherlands, France, etc.
• Recruitment platforms & career services — enrich your listings database with structured EU academic job data via the Apify API
• Data analysts — track hiring trends in specific fields (Physics, CS, Economics) over time

Job portals covered (EURES, DAAD, EuroScienceJobs, UniversityPositions, INOMICS)

• EURES — European Employment Services (a general EU job board with millions of listings). Keywords are matched in the job title by default (euresKeywordScope), then the academic filter keeps only academic/research roles. This is the main volume source.
• DAAD PhDGermany — Germany's official PhD position database (Germany only; skipped automatically if you don't request DE).
• EuroScienceJobs — Science and research jobs across Europe; the actor pulls each country's full listing and filters by keyword in the title/tags.
• UniversityPositions — University and research-institute positions EU-wide; full country listing filtered by keyword in the title/tags.
• INOMICS — Economics, finance, and social-science academic jobs. Because it's economics-focused, non-economics keywords (e.g. biology) will legitimately return few or no results from this source.

How to find all PhD and postdoc positions in Europe in one search

1. Click Try for free on the Apify page.
2. Adjust keywords (e.g. ["postdoc", "PhD"]) and countries (e.g. ["DE", "NL"]).
3. Leave academicOnly = true unless you specifically want corporate R&D as well.
4. Click Start. Download results as JSON / CSV / Excel / XML from the Output tab.

Quick-start input — copy and paste this:

{
  "keywords": ["research"],
  "countries": ["DE", "NL", "FR"],
  "academicOnly": true,
  "translateKeywords": true,
  "maxResultsPerSource": 300,
  "postedWithinDays": 30,
  "incrementalMode": false
}

Set up a weekly job alert (scheduled runs + incremental mode)

The strongest way to use this actor — a personal academic job alert that costs ~$0.20/week:

1. Run the actor once with your keywords and countries to seed the baseline.
2. In Apify Console, open Schedules and schedule the actor weekly with the same input plus incrementalMode: true.
3. Every scheduled run now returns only jobs not seen in previous runs — your weekly "new positions" digest.
4. Optional: attach an Apify integration (email, Slack, webhook) to get the new postings delivered automatically.

Filter by keyword, country, and posting date

Field	Description	Default
keywords	Search terms, combined with OR — a job matching any keyword is kept (results are merged fairly across keywords). Use a multi-word entry like "machine learning" to match that phrase. Each portal matches the keyword in the job title (EURES title scope, and title/tags on the curated boards), so add several related terms if you want broader recall.	["research"]
countries	ISO country codes.	["DE"]
translateKeywords	Auto-expand keywords into the languages of the selected countries (e.g. research → recherche (FR), Forschung (DE), ricerca (IT)). Surfaces local-language jobs an English-only search misses — French results jumped from ~2 to 50+ in testing. Unrecognised keywords are searched as-is.	true
academicOnly	Keep only genuine academic / research roles. Drops corporate and staffing-agency postings (e.g. "Research Associate" at a GmbH / AG / CRO / Personalservice) while keeping universities and research institutes — including those legally registered as a GmbH (Helmholtz, Forschungszentrum Jülich, etc.).	true
euresKeywordScope	How EURES matches keywords. title = keyword must be in the job title (precise, recommended). everywhere = match anywhere in the listing (broad but noisy — machine learning matches 200k+ jobs). Only affects EURES.	title
maxResultsPerSource	Cap per portal (after the academic filter). Raise it for more results — portals like EURES have thousands of listings.	300 (max 5000)
maxTotalResults	Overall cap after dedup. 0 = no cap.	0
enabledSources	Which portals to query.	all 5
postedWithinDays	Only return jobs posted within N days. 0 = all.	0
incrementalMode	Only return jobs not seen in previous runs.	false
proxyConfiguration	Optional Apify proxy.	disabled
debug	Show detailed diagnostic logs (per-request URLs, page-by-page progress). Off by default for a clean run log; enable only for troubleshooting.	false

Output: what each job record contains

Each item is a flat JSON object. Example:

{
  "id": "daad_d5366ddc0d43c536",
  "title": "PhD Student (f/m/d) ImmunoFLASH: CAR T immunotherapy with FLASH radiotherapy",
  "institution": "Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf",
  "department": "Institute of Radiooncology – OncoRay",
  "country": "DE",
  "city": "Dresden",
  "deadline": "2026-06-30",
  "postedDate": "2026-05-12",
  "salaryInfo": null,
  "salaryMonthlyEur": null,
  "contractDuration": "01.10.2026",
  "workingLanguage": "German, English",
  "jobType": "Full PhD",
  "requiredDegree": "Master, Diplom",
  "field": "Medicine",
  "fundingSource": "Helmholtz Association",
  "applicationUrl": "https://www.daad.de/en/.../phd-student-fmd-immunoflash-...",
  "sourcePortal": "DAAD",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-14T17:24:18.823Z"
}

You can download the dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML from the Output tab or via the Apify API.

Data fields

Field	Type	Notes
id	string	Format: {sourceCode}_{md5hash}. Cross-source duplicates dedupe to one row; the kept id is the first source seen.
title	string	Job title
institution	string	Hiring organization
department	string|null	Lab / faculty if available
country	string|null	ISO-2 code (e.g. DE, NL)
city	string|null	City or region name; NUTS region codes resolved to human-readable names
deadline	string|null	ISO date when available
postedDate	string|null	ISO date
salaryInfo	string|null	Raw salary text when explicitly stated on the listing (rare; most listings don't expose structured salary).
salaryMonthlyEur	number|null	Normalized monthly gross EUR — best-effort parse from salaryInfo. Frequently null.
contractDuration	string|null	Schedule ("Full-time" / "Part-time" from EURES & UniversityPositions) OR start date from DAAD.
workingLanguage	string|null	DAAD only
jobType	string|null	e.g. "Full PhD", "Structured programme"
requiredDegree	string|null	DAAD only
field	string|null	Inferred research field (Physics, CS, Medicine, etc.)
fundingSource	string|null	Funding agency OR research-consortium affiliation when mentioned in the listing. Examples: "DFG", "ERC", "Horizon Europe", "MSCA", "BMBF", "Helmholtz Association", "Max Planck Society", "Leibniz Association", "Fraunhofer". Heuristic — verify on the source page if critical.
tags	array|null	EuroScienceJobs / UniversityPositions tag chips
descriptionRaw	string|null	EURES/INOMICS: first ~400 chars, HTML stripped. DAAD: synthetic summary from metadata fields. EuroScienceJobs/UniversityPositions: not populated. Emails and IBANs always redacted.
applicationUrl	string|null	Direct link to the posting
sourcePortal	string	EURES / DAAD / EuroScienceJobs / UniversityPositions / INOMICS
scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp

How much does it cost to scrape EU academic jobs?

Pay-per-result: $4.00 per 1,000 results.

Concrete examples:

• 200 academic jobs across all 5 sources = $0.80
• A weekly incremental run that surfaces ~50 new jobs = $0.20/week

Incremental mode is free to enable and significantly reduces cost on recurring runs.

For recruitment platforms and career services: API access

Everything works programmatically through the Apify API — start runs with your own keyword/country matrix, fetch normalized JSON, and feed it into your own job board, CRM, or analytics pipeline. Combine schedules, incrementalMode, and webhooks to keep a continuously fresh EU academic jobs feed without re-paying for unchanged listings.

Tips

• Non-English countries: leave translateKeywords on — searching research across ["FR","DE","IT"] automatically also matches recherche, Forschung, ricerca, so you don't need to know the local words. (In testing this took France from ~2 results to 50+.)
• More results vs. more precision: the default matches your keyword in the job title (precise). For broader recall, add related keywords (e.g. ["biology", "molecular", "genetics"]) or set euresKeywordScope: "everywhere" (more results from EURES, but noisier).
• Want more total results? Raise maxResultsPerSource (up to 5000) and add more countries. EURES is the only source large enough to scale; the specialist boards are smaller and are already returned in full.
• Turn academicOnly off only if you specifically want corporate R&D positions from EURES.
• Use postedWithinDays: 14 for fresh-only feeds.
• Combine incrementalMode: true with a scheduled run to build a deduplicated weekly digest.
• For large multi-country crawls, enable proxyConfiguration to avoid IP rate-limiting on INOMICS / EuroScienceJobs.
• Countries must be ISO-2 codes ("DE", "NL", "FR") — full country names are not supported.

FAQ

How do I get notified about new PhD positions every week?

Schedule the actor weekly in Apify Console with incrementalMode: true — each run returns only postings not seen before. Attach an email or Slack integration to deliver them automatically. Typical cost: ~$0.20/week.

Does it find jobs posted in German, French, or Dutch?

Yes — with translateKeywords on (the default), your keywords are auto-expanded into the languages of the selected countries, so local-language postings are found without you knowing the local terms.

Which countries are supported?

Any European country by ISO-2 code. Verified with DE; the other sources expose NL, FR, AT, CH, BE, SE, DK, FI, NO, IT, ES, PL, IE, GR and more. DAAD only covers Germany; other sources cover broader EU.

Can I get only university positions, no company jobs?

Yes — that's the default (academicOnly: true). It drops corporate and staffing-agency postings while keeping universities and research institutes, including those legally registered as a GmbH (Helmholtz, Forschungszentrum Jülich, etc.).

Why are some salaryInfo / deadline fields null?

Not all portals expose them. EURES doesn't return deadlines via API; salary is rarely structured. We extract what's available.

Why don't I get all the jobs a portal's website shows?

Two reasons. First, the website count is unfiltered — with academicOnly on, the actual academic share is much smaller. Second, EURES's search API only serves the first 10,000 results of any single query (a fixed result-window limit, unrelated to proxies or your plan); for narrower keyword searches this is never a problem since they return well under 10,000.

Is this legal?

The Actor only fetches publicly-listed job postings. It respects rate limits, identifies itself, and redacts emails / IBANs from descriptions. You are responsible for downstream use complying with each portal's terms.

Support / bugs

Use the Issues tab on this Actor page to report problems or request features.

Disclaimer

The Actor scrapes third-party websites whose layouts may change without notice. Results are best-effort; verify critical details (deadlines, salaries) on the source page before applying. This is an independent, unofficial tool — not affiliated with or endorsed by EURES, DAAD, EuroScienceJobs, UniversityPositions, or INOMICS.