CrossRef Academic Publication Search

What does CrossRef Academic Publication Search do?

CrossRef Academic Publication Search queries the CrossRef API to find academic publications from a database of over 130 million scholarly works. It returns paper titles, authors, DOIs, publication dates, journal names, publishers, citation counts, and abstracts. This actor is essential for researchers, librarians, data scientists, and anyone who needs structured access to the global academic literature.

Why search academic publications on CrossRef?

CrossRef is the backbone of academic citation linking, indexing publications from thousands of publishers worldwide. Searching CrossRef programmatically enables literature reviews at scale, citation analysis, research trend tracking, and building academic knowledge graphs. Instead of manually searching through multiple journal websites, this actor centralizes access to the largest scholarly metadata repository.

How to search CrossRef publications

1. Open the CrossRef Academic Publication Search actor on Apify.
2. Enter a search query such as a topic, paper title, or author name.
3. Set the maximum number of results you want to retrieve.
4. Click Start to begin the search.
5. Wait for the run to complete and download your results.
6. Export data in JSON, CSV, Excel, or other supported formats.

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
query	string	Paper title, author, or topic	"machine learning"
maxResults	integer	Maximum papers to return	25

Output data

Each result contains:

• title - Paper title
• authors - List of author names
• doi - Digital Object Identifier
• url - Direct link to the publication
• publishedDate - Publication date
• journal - Journal or container title
• publisher - Publishing organization
• citationCount - Number of times cited
• type - Publication type (journal-article, proceedings, etc.)
• abstract - Paper abstract (when available)

Cost of usage

CrossRef Academic Publication Search is extremely lightweight, making a single API call per search. Compute costs are minimal.

• Per result: $0.01
• Per 1,000 results: $10
• Actor start: $0.005

The Apify free tier is more than sufficient for regular academic research workflows.

Tips and advanced options

• Works with zero configuration using the default query "machine learning" to demonstrate output.
• Results are sorted by relevance, so the most matching publications appear first.
• Use specific search terms like author names or exact paper titles for more precise results.
• Citation counts help identify the most influential papers in a field.
• For developer-focused research, combine with Stack Exchange Q&A Search and GitHub User Profile Scraper.