Web Data Collection for Academic and Market Research
Gather publicly available data from research databases, government portals, academic repositories, and news archives to support quantitative research, policy analysis, and data journalism.
Data Collection Challenges in Research
Government and institutional portals often serve data through legacy systems with inconsistent HTML, requiring robust extraction logic.
Large-scale literature and document collection spans thousands of pages across multiple sources with heterogeneous formats.
Some public data portals implement access controls even for open data, requiring proper request headers and session management.
Temporal data collection across years of archived pages demands handling URL patterns, pagination, and historical snapshots.
Structured tabular data embedded in HTML — statistics tables, census figures, economic indicators — requires precise extraction to preserve column alignment.
Common Use Cases
Policy research datasets built from government statistical agency, parliamentary, and regulatory portal data.
Media monitoring and news archive construction for longitudinal research on public discourse.
Bibliometric data collection from academic preprint servers and citation repositories for research output analysis.
Environmental and climate data aggregation from public monitoring station networks.
Economic and demographic data time series construction from national statistics office publications.
Extracted Data Types
Quick Start
curl -X POST https://alterlab.io/api/v1/scrape \
-H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"url": "https://data.example-gov.org/statistics/gdp-by-quarter/2025",
"render": "static",
"output_format": "markdown",
"extract": {
"title": "string",
"period": "string",
"gdp_value": "number",
"currency": "string"
}
}'Need an API key? — no credit card required.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can AlterLab extract structured data from government statistical tables?
Yes. AlterLab's structured extraction mode parses HTML tables and returns specified fields as typed JSON. For government portals that render tables via JavaScript, smart rendering mode ensures the full data set is loaded before extraction. The markdown output format is also available for document-style pages where structure needs to be preserved.
How do I collect data from paginated archive pages?
Submit each page URL as a separate request, or use the batch API to submit all archive page URLs simultaneously. For dynamically paginated portals, smart rendering mode can capture the current page's data after navigation events.
Compliance & Responsible Use
Public government and institutional data is often freely usable under open data licences, but site-specific terms of service and copyright on curated datasets still apply. Academic data portals may have publisher agreements restricting automated access. Organizations should verify licensing terms and consult their legal team for large-scale collection projects.
AlterLab is designed for accessing publicly available data. Always review the terms of service for any website you access, respect robots.txt directives, and ensure your use case complies with applicable laws in your jurisdiction.
Explore other industry guides
Browse all industry data extraction guides or explore use case guides for more specific technical workflows.
Your first scrape.
Sixty seconds.
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Just a POST request.
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