# Google Scholar Scraper (`sfoln/google-scholar-search`)

Search Google Scholar: one row per paper with title, link, parsed authors, venue and year, citation count, snippet and PDF link, plus a per-query summary with total citations. $8 per 1,000 result pages of up to 10 papers.

- Family: SEO & search
- Categories: AI, Education, Developer tools
- Availability: on request (private on Apify). Email contact@sfoln.com with subject "Access request: Google Scholar Scraper (sfoln/google-scholar-search)" before calling; calls fail until it is public.
- JSON: https://www.sfoln.com/actors/google-scholar-search.json
- MCP: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=sfoln/google-scholar-search
- REST (sync): POST https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/sfoln~google-scholar-search/run-sync-get-dataset-items
- REST (async): POST https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/sfoln~google-scholar-search/runs

Google Scholar Scraper searches Google Scholar and returns one clean row per paper: title, link, parsed authors, venue and year, citation count, snippet and PDF link when Google shows one. Each query also gets a summary row with total citations and the most-cited paper. Built for literature reviews, research dashboards, citation tracking and AI research agents.

## Price per delivered record

| Event | Price | Per 1,000 | Charged for |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Google Scholar results page (`google-scholar-query`) | $0.008 | $8 / 1,000 | Charged once per Google Scholar results page of up to 10 papers (one upstream credit). |

Pay-per-event, USD, billed by Apify; no platform usage charge. Only records with status `ok` are charged. Cap a run with `maxTotalChargeUsd`. Apify free plan: up to 10 per run.

## Run

```bash
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/sfoln~google-scholar-search/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queries":["attention is all you need"]}'
```

MCP client configuration:

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=sfoln/google-scholar-search"
    }
  }
}
```

Example prompt: Search Google Scholar for "attention is all you need" and list the 10 most-cited papers with their authors, year and citation counts.

## Input

Enter Google Scholar searches (one per line). Each query writes one row per paper plus one `query_summary` row.

| Field | Type | Default | Meaning |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `queries` (required) | array | — | Scholar queries: Topics, paper titles or author names to search in Google Scholar, one per line. Accounts on the Apify free plan can process up to 10 queries per run. |
| `resultsPerQuery` | integer | `10` | Papers per query: How many papers to fetch per query, rounded up to a multiple of 10. Each page of 10 papers is one google-scholar-query event. |
| `page` | integer | `1` | Start page: Result page to start from (1 = most relevant). |
| `yearFrom` | integer | — | Published from (year): Keep only papers published in or after this year. The filter runs on the returned papers (see README), so pages are charged even when papers get filtered out. |
| `yearTo` | integer | — | Published until (year): Keep only papers published in or before this year (same filtering rules as yearFrom). |
| `language` | string | `"en"` | Language (hl): Interface language code, e.g. en, de. |
| `maxQueries` | integer | `1000` | Max queries: Safety cap on the number of queries processed in this run. |
| `concurrency` | integer | `5` | Concurrency: How many queries run in parallel. |
| `includeRaw` | boolean | `false` | Include raw upstream response: Attach the unmodified upstream pages to each query_summary row. |

Example input:

```json
{
  "queries": [
    "attention is all you need"
  ]
}
```

## Output

One record per input item with `status` (`ok` is charged; `not_found`, `error`, `skipped_*` are free) and `charged`. The run stores an `OUTPUT` summary record.

| Field | Type | Meaning |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `input` | string | Input |
| `query` | string | Query |
| `resultType` | string | Result type: paper \| query_summary (one per query, not charged itself) |
| `rank` | integer | null | Rank: Overall position among the papers Google returned (before the year filter): (page − 1) × 10 + place on its page. |
| `position` | integer | null | Position on page |
| `page` | integer | null | Page |
| `title` | string | null | Title |
| `url` | string | null | URL |
| `domain` | string | null | Domain |
| `publicationInfo` | string | null | Publication info (raw): Authors – venue, year – host line as shown by Google Scholar. |
| `authors` | array | Authors: Parsed from publicationInfo (Google abbreviates first names). |
| `authorsTruncated` | boolean | Authors truncated: true when Google cut the author list with … |
| `venue` | string | null | Venue |
| `year` | integer | null | Year |
| `snippet` | string | null | Snippet |
| `citedBy` | integer | null | Cited by |
| `pdfUrl` | string | null | PDF URL |
| `htmlUrl` | string | null | HTML URL |
| `scholarId` | string | null | Scholar ID |
| `totalPapers` | integer | null | Papers |
| `returnedByGoogle` | integer | null | Returned by Google |
| `filteredOutByYear` | integer | null | Filtered out by year |
| `pagesFetched` | integer | null | Pages fetched |
| `creditsUsed` | number | null | Credits used: query_summary: upstream credits the query used. |
| `creditsCharged` | number | null | Credits charged: query_summary: google-scholar-query events charged for the query, before any of its rows was written (equal to creditsUsed unless the maximum cost per run was reached). |
| `totalCitations` | integer | null | Total citations |
| `mostCitedTitle` | string | null | Most cited |
| `newestYear` | integer | null | Newest year: query_summary: latest publication year among the papers written. |
| `oldestYear` | integer | null | Oldest year: query_summary: earliest publication year among the papers written. |
| `yearFrom` | integer | null | Year from: query_summary: yearFrom filter applied, or null. |
| `yearTo` | integer | null | Year to: query_summary: yearTo filter applied, or null. |
| `status` | string | Status: ok \| not_found \| error \| skipped_budget \| skipped_free_plan |
| `charged` | boolean | Charged: true on a paper row covered by the google-scholar-query charge of its results page; the query_summary row is never charged itself (see creditsCharged). |
| `chargedEvent` | string | Charged event |
| `chargedCount` | integer | Events charged: Events actually charged when the charge came back short of the requested count (present only then; a warning explains it). |
| `source` | string | Data source |
| `fetchedAt` | string | Fetched at |

Example record:

```json
{
  "input": "attention is all you need",
  "query": "attention is all you need",
  "resultType": "paper",
  "rank": 1,
  "position": null,
  "page": 1,
  "title": "Attention is all you need",
  "url": "https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/7181-attention-is-all",
  "domain": "proceedings.neurips.cc",
  "publicationInfo": "A Vaswani, N Shazeer, N Parmar… - Advances in neural …, 2017 - proceedings.neurips.cc",
  "authors": [
    "A Vaswani",
    "N Shazeer",
    "N Parmar"
  ],
  "authorsTruncated": true,
  "venue": "Advances in neural …",
  "year": 2017,
  "snippet": "… to attend to all positions in the decoder up to and including that position…",
  "citedBy": 119097,
  "pdfUrl": null,
  "htmlUrl": null,
  "scholarId": null,
  "status": "ok",
  "charged": true,
  "chargedEvent": "google-scholar-query",
  "source": "serper",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-10-14T10:00:00.000Z"
}
```

## Related

- [Google Search Results Scraper](https://www.sfoln.com/actors/google-search-results.md) (`sfoln/google-search-results`)
- [Google News Scraper](https://www.sfoln.com/actors/google-news-search.md) (`sfoln/google-news-search`)

Publisher: SFOLN LLC, contact@sfoln.com. Catalogue: https://www.sfoln.com/catalog.json. Agent guide: https://www.sfoln.com/agents.md.