Crossref Scraper - Scholarly Works, DOIs & Funders

Search Crossref - the DOI registry of 160M+ scholarly works - or look up DOIs directly, and get clean rows for every work: title, authors and affiliation, publisher, journal, year, citation count, funders with award numbers, license, ISSN/ISBN and the abstract. Search, filter, or paste a list of DOIs. Built on the official API - no key, no browser.

What you get per work

Field	Meaning
doi / doiUrl / title	DOI, resolvable link, and title
authors / authorCount / firstAuthorAffiliation	Authors and the lead author's institution
publisher / containerTitle / volume / issue / page	Publisher and journal placement
publishedYear / publishedDate / workType	Dates and type (journal-article, preprint, book...)
citedByCount / referenceCount	Citations received and references made
funders / funderNames	Funding bodies with award / grant numbers
licenseUrls / isOpenAccess	License links and an open-access flag
issn / isbn / subjects / language / abstract	Identifiers, subjects and abstract

Input

{ "searchQueries": ["machine learning"], "sortBy": "cited", "maxItemsPerQuery": 100 }

• Search queries - one per line (title, author, abstract, metadata). DOIs - exact lookups.
• Filter - a Crossref filter expression, e.g. from-pub-date:2024-01-01,type:journal-article,has-funder:true.
• Import from a file - paste a list, or link a public .txt/.csv, a Google Sheet/Drive link, or an Apify key-value-store record. Queries and DOIs are auto-detected.
• Sort by relevance, most recent, most cited, or recently indexed. Output fields trim the record.

Leave everything empty and the run returns a small free sample so you can see the shape first.

Reliability

Reads the official Crossref REST API on the polite pool (UA + mailto), keyless, cursor-paginated for deep result sets. A run that returns nothing bills $0.

Honest limits

• Metadata, not full text. Crossref indexes the scholarly record - you get the DOI, citation graph and funders; for the article body follow url/doiUrl to the publisher.
• abstract is present only when the publisher deposited one with Crossref (many do not) - an honest null, not a scraping gap.
• funders / licenseUrls depend on publisher deposits too - richly populated for recent works, sparser for older ones. Filter with has-funder:true / has-license:true when you need them.
• citedByCount is Crossref's open citation count, which can differ from Scopus/Web of Science.

Pricing

$0.002 per work on the FREE tier (tiered pricing lowers it with volume). Only works actually saved are billed; an empty run costs nothing.

Output views

• Works - title, authors, journal, year, citations, funders and DOI.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

Available through the Apify MCP server - an agent can pull a funder's grant output, build a citation-ranked reading list with DOIs, or assemble a RAG index of a field's literature in one call. Pairs with our arXiv, PubMed and OpenAlex scrapers.

Agent-ready: autonomous payments (x402 & Skyfire)

This actor is agent-ready - AI agents can discover it, run it, and pay for it autonomously, with no Apify account and no human in the loop. It uses pay-per-event pricing and limited permissions, so it qualifies for Apify's agentic-payment standards:

• x402 - an open, HTTP-native payment protocol. Agents pay per run in USDC on the Base network directly through the Apify MCP server - no account, no API key.
• Skyfire - agent-to-service payments for fully autonomous AI-agent workflows.

Building an AI agent, MCP tool, or autonomous data pipeline? This scraper is ready to plug in and pay as it goes.