Crossref Scholarly Papers Scraper – DOI Metadata

Get clean scholarly paper and DOI metadata from Crossref: title, authors, journal, publisher, abstract, citation counts, subjects, ISSN and publication date. Search by query, title, author or date — or fetch by DOI. As JSON, CSV or Excel. Free, no key.

💵 Pricing

Pay per result — about $0.40 per 1,000 papers. No subscription, no proxy needed. You only pay for the data you scrape, and new Apify accounts include free monthly credits so you can test it for $0.

🔎 What can it extract?

• DOI, title, authors ("Given Family")
• Journal / container title, publisher, work type
• Citation count (is-referenced-by-count)
• Publication date (YYYY-MM-DD), volume, issue, page
• Abstract (HTML/JATS stripped to clean text)
• Subjects, ISSN, canonical URL
• Search by query, title, author or publication date, or fetch specific DOIs

🚀 How do I use it?

1. Click Try for free.
2. Set the input (see example below).
3. Click Start and download results as JSON, CSV or Excel — or pull them via the API / schedule them.

⚙️ Input example

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "machine learning",
  "fromDate": "2023-01-01",
  "sort": "is-referenced-by-count",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Fetch specific papers by DOI:

{
  "mode": "dois",
  "dois": ["10.1038/nature12373", "10.1145/3292500.3330701"]
}

📦 Output example

{
  "doi": "10.1038/nature14539",
  "title": "Deep learning",
  "authors": ["Yann LeCun", "Yoshua Bengio", "Geoffrey Hinton"],
  "journal": "Nature",
  "publisher": "Springer Science and Business Media LLC",
  "type": "journal-article",
  "published_date": "2015-05-28",
  "citations": 61234,
  "url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539",
  "abstract": "Deep learning allows computational models ...",
  "subjects": ["Multidisciplinary"],
  "issn": ["0028-0836", "1476-4687"],
  "volume": "521",
  "issue": "7553",
  "page": "436-444",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-01T00:00:00+00:00"
}

🎯 Use cases

• Literature reviews and systematic-review pipelines
• Citation analysis and research-impact dashboards
• Building academic search / recommendation apps
• Feeding RAG and AI research assistants with clean metadata
• Bibliographic enrichment of reference lists by DOI

💰 How much will it cost?

You pay only the per-result price (no proxy cost): 100 → ~$0.04 · 1,000 → ~$0.40 · 10,000 → ~$4

🆚 Why this one

Feature	This actor	Others
Search + fetch by DOI	✅	one or the other
Citation counts	✅	often missing
Clean abstract (JATS stripped)	✅	raw XML
No key / no proxy	✅	sometimes

🔗 Related actors

• arXiv Scraper — preprints
• Wikipedia Scraper — knowledge
• GitHub Scraper — repositories
• Stack Overflow Scraper — Q&A

❓ FAQ

Key/proxy? No — Crossref is a free, open API. Bulk? Search paginates up to 1,000 results, or pass a list of DOIs.

🛟 Support

Found a bug or need an extra field? Open an issue on the actor — fixes and new fields ship fast.

Legal & privacy

Data via the public Crossref REST API (open scholarly metadata). A polite-pool User-Agent with a mailto is sent on every request.

---

Keywords: crossref scraper, doi metadata, scholarly papers, academic search, citation data, research metadata, bibliographic data, JSON CSV Excel