Research Paper Scraper: OpenAlex, Crossref & arXiv

Search 250M+ academic papers across three official scholarly databases and get one clean table, with citation counts, authors, institutions, open-access status and PDF links.

No key, no login, no institutional subscription.

Three databases, one shape

Source	What it's best at
OpenAlex	250M+ works with citation counts, author affiliations, institutions, topics and OA status. The default.
Crossref	The DOI registry itself, authoritative for published journal articles and reference counts.
arXiv	Preprints, with direct PDF links: the only source that reliably gives you something downloadable.

Query several at once to compare coverage. The same paper legitimately appears in all three; dedupeAcrossSources matches on DOI (falling back to normalised title) and keeps one copy, duplicates are not charged.

What you get

Field	Example
title	Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer…
authors, authorCount	["Ze Liu","Yutong Lin","Yue Cao"], 8
institutions	["Microsoft Research Asia","Tsinghua University"]
year, publishedAt	2021, 2021-10-01
citedByCount	30720
venue, publisher, type	ICCV, IEEE, conference-paper
doi, url, pdfUrl, openAccessUrl
isOpenAccess, isRetracted	true, false
topics, categories, language
abstract	on Crossref and arXiv rows
referenceCount, arxivId

Example input

{
  "searchQueries": ["large language models", "retrieval augmented generation"],
  "sources": ["openalex", "arxiv"],
  "yearFrom": 2023,
  "minCitations": 50,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 200
}

Filters

• yearFrom / yearTo, publication window
• minCitations, impact threshold
• openAccessOnly, only papers you can actually read

Filtered-out and deduplicated papers are not charged.

Who this is for

• Literature reviews: a whole field in one export, sorted by citations
• R&D and competitive intel, who's publishing in your space, at which institutions
• AI / dataset builders: clean paper metadata with abstracts and downloadable PDFs
• Bibliometrics: citation counts and institutional affiliations at scale
• Journalists & analysts: find the highly-cited work behind a claim

Three academic databases, deduplicated

Source	Endpoint	Strongest at
OpenAlex	api.openalex.org/works	coverage, citation counts, topics, institutions
Crossref	api.crossref.org/works	DOI metadata and abstracts for anything published
arXiv	the arXiv Atom API	preprints, often months before formal publication

Pick any combination in sources. The same paper appears in more than one, so dedupeAcrossSources matches on DOI, falling back to a normalised title, and keeps one copy. Duplicates are not charged.

Per paper: title, authors, abstract where the source publishes one, year, venue, DOI, citation count, open-access status and a link to the PDF when one exists, plus topics and institutions on OpenAlex rows.

Filters: yearFrom / yearTo, minCitations, and openAccessOnly for a literature review you can actually read without a library subscription.

No API key for any of the three. OpenAlex and Crossref both ask politely for a contact address in the user agent rather than a key, and this sends one.

Notes

• arXiv publishes no citation counts. If you set minCitations, arXiv rows are all removed, the Actor warns you in the log rather than silently returning nothing. Use OpenAlex or Crossref for citation filtering.
• Abstracts come from Crossref and arXiv. OpenAlex rows carry topics and institutions instead.
• All three APIs ask callers to identify themselves with a contact address (their "polite pool"). This Actor does, by design, that's the entire access requirement.
• Set a max charge per run in the run options for a hard spend ceiling. The Actor honors it and stops cleanly.

Pricing

Pay per result. One row = one paper. Failed queries come back as error rows and are not charged, and neither are duplicates or anything your filters removed.