ORCID Researcher Profiles Scraper

What this Actor scrapes

ORCID is the researcher-identity registry behind most of scholarly publishing — every ORCID iD carries a public profile with names, affiliations, and (optionally) employment history. The registry's own search API exposes a full Lucene query syntax, but no public tool surfaces it, and the pagination ceiling ORCID enforces for unauthenticated callers is easy to walk straight past without noticing. This Actor builds correct Lucene queries from plain fields, paginates honestly against ORCID's own limits, and — on request — fetches each researcher's employment history so a recruiting or research-ops list lands in one flat, ready-to-use dataset.

What we handle for you

• Builds correct ORCID Lucene queries from plain fields — no field-name guessing, no malformed clause syntax.
• Paginates expanded-search honestly against ORCID's own documented rows/start ceilings, re-checking num-found every page instead of trusting a stale first read.
• Retries transient 429/5xx responses with backoff, and never retries a documented 400 — it surfaces ORCID's own error message instead.

Use cases

• Build a recruiting longlist of researchers at a target institution or department.
• Track a competitor lab's or department's current and former staff.
• Enrich a CRM or outreach list with verified ORCID iDs and public affiliation history.
• Compile an institutional or funder report of researchers matching a name/affiliation query.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "affiliationOrgName": "MIT",
  "maxResults": 20,
  "enrichEmployment": false,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

orcid_idgiven_namesfamily_namescredit_nameemailinstitutionscurrent_institutioncurrent_roleemployment_history

{
  "orcid_id": "0000-0002-4392-0814",
  "given_names": "Donald",
  "family_names": "Smith",
  "credit_name": null,
  "email": null,
  "institutions": [
    "Guilford College",
    "MIT",
    "The University of Chicago"
  ],
  "current_institution": "Guilford College",
  "current_role": "Professor",
  "employment_history": [
    {
      "organization_name": "Guilford College",
      "city": "Greensboro",
      "region": "NC",
      "country": "US",
      "role_title": "Professor",
      "department_name": "Physics",
      "start_date": "2005-08-01",
      "end_date": null,
      "is_current": true
    }
  ]
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Only public ORCID data is fetched — no OAuth-scoped or /read-limited fields are requested or inferred.
• Unauthenticated ORCID reach is capped at start<=10 000 — a very broad query (e.g. a common surname with no other filter) may not reach every match. maxResults is capped at 11 000 for the same reason.
• enrichEmployment adds one HTTP call per row and increases run time; a researcher with no employment data on file simply returns empty enrichment fields, not an error.