Crossref Scraper

Bulk-scrape scholarly metadata from Crossref, the DOI registry indexing 150M+ works across virtually every academic publisher. Get DOIs, titles, authors (with ORCID), journals, publishers, publication dates, citation counts, references, ISSNs, subjects and abstracts as clean JSON, CSV, Excel or XML. Full-text search plus date and type filters, thousands of results per run. No account, no API key — fast and reliable.

What does the Crossref Scraper do?

The Crossref Scraper searches the Crossref index and returns rich, structured metadata for every matching scholarly work. Filter by free-text query, publication date range and work type, then export DOIs, citation counts, author lists and abstracts at scale — ideal for literature reviews, bibliometrics and building research databases.

Features

• 🔎 Full-text search — across titles, authors, journals and more
• 📅 Date filters — from/until publication date
• 🗂️ Type filter — journal-article, book-chapter, proceedings-article, dataset, preprint…
• 🔗 DOIs + citation counts — citation count per work, plus reference counts
• 👥 Authors with ORCID + affiliation
• 🧾 Abstracts — when the publisher deposits them (coverage varies)
• 📊 Bulk export — scales to hundreds of thousands of records per run

What you get

One record per work:

{
  "doi": "10.1089/crispr.2018.29011.rba",
  "title": "Cultivating CRISPR",
  "type": "journal-article",
  "authors": [{ "name": "Rodolphe Barrangou", "given": "Rodolphe", "family": "Barrangou", "orcid": null, "affiliation": [] }],
  "journal": "The CRISPR Journal",
  "publisher": "SAGE Publications",
  "publishedYear": 2018,
  "citationCount": 12,
  "referenceCount": 0,
  "issn": "2573-1599",
  "subjects": [],
  "url": "https://doi.org/10.1089/crispr.2018.29011.rba",
  "abstract": null
}

Output schema

Input

{
  "query": "crispr gene editing",
  "fromDate": "2020-01-01",
  "type": "journal-article",
  "maxResults": 5000
}

Use cases

• Literature reviews & bibliometrics — pull every work on a topic with citation counts.
• Research databases — build DOI/metadata datasets at scale.
• Citation analysis — rank works and authors by impact.
• Publisher / journal monitoring — track new output by type and date.
• Enrichment — resolve DOIs to full metadata for an existing reference list.

How to scrape Crossref data

1. Add the Crossref Scraper to your Apify account.
2. Enter a query, or leave it blank and browse by filters.
3. Optionally set fromDate/toDate, type, hasAbstractOnly and maxResults.
4. Click Run.
5. Export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or pull it via the Apify API.

Need more research data?

• arXiv Scraper — preprints with full abstracts and PDF links.
• ClinicalTrials Scraper — study records from the clinical trials registry.
• OpenLibrary Scraper — book metadata, authors, subjects and editions.

FAQ

Do I need an API key or login? No. There's no account, login or API key required. You can optionally add your email via mailto for faster, more reliable access.

How many works can I scrape per run? Set maxResults as high as you need — it scales to hundreds of thousands of records per run, so you can pull an entire topic or date range in one go.

How does billing work? You pay only per work you get, so small filtered runs stay cheap. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

What format is the output? Structured JSON — one record per work — exportable as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML. Each record includes DOI, title, authors with ORCID, journal, publisher, year, citation count, references and (where deposited) an abstract.

Can I filter by date or work type? Yes. Use fromDate/toDate for a publication date range, type to keep only journal-article, book-chapter, dataset, preprint etc., and hasAbstractOnly to return only works that include an abstract.

Is this only public data? Yes. Crossref openly publishes DOI and citation metadata, and this Actor returns only those public records.

Can I connect this to other tools? The Crossref Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. It works with Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients and MCP. Or use webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Notes

Original clean-room implementation. Returns Crossref's openly available metadata as-is; you are responsible for compliance with Crossref's terms. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Crossref.

You pay only for what the run returns. Set a maximum cost per run and it stops cleanly at that limit.