NSF Award Search
NSF Award Search is the US National Science Foundation's public record of the awards it has made. Through ScholarMuse, an agent queries the NSF Award Search API by topic, optionally narrowed by principal investigator, awardee institution and start year, and receives each award's number, investigator, directorate and division, program, dates, amounts and abstract.
ScholarMuse tools: search_grants. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from NSF Awards.
search_grants
amount is the estimated total award; when NSF gives none, the obligated amount is used instead. fiscalYear is not set for NSF records.
- projectNumber
- NSF award ID
- pi
- Principal investigator name
- organization
- Awardee institution name
- organizationLocation
- Awardee city and state code
- agency
- Directorate and division abbreviations
- program
- NSF funding program name
- startDate
- Award start date (YYYY-MM-DD)
- endDate
- Award expiry date (YYYY-MM-DD)
- amount
- Estimated total award in USD
- obligatedToDate
- Funds obligated so far in USD
- abstract
- Award abstract, cut at 2,000 characters
What it covers
- Awards listed in the US National Science Foundation's Award Search.
- Optional filters: principal investigator name, awardee institution name, and a range of award start years.
- Each record links to its award page on nsf.gov.
Limits
- One call returns at most 25 projects (default 10). Without a funder choice, that number is shared between NIH, NSF and UKRI, so ask for NSF only to fill it with NSF awards.
- A topic is always required. Quotation marks, brackets and the words AND, OR, NOT are removed from it, so exact-phrase and boolean searches are not supported.
- The year filter applies to the award start date. There is no filter for directorate, program or award size.
- One investigator is returned per award; co-investigators and resulting publications are not. An upstream request is abandoned after 30 seconds.
How ScholarMuse reaches NSF Awards
The connector calls api.nsf.gov/services/v1/awards.json with no API key. The words of the query are joined with AND, so an award must contain all of them.
Responses are cached for up to 12 hours, so an award published by NSF today may not show until the cache expires.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: Public domain (US Government work)
Data from the US National Science Foundation Award Search API (nsf.gov/awardsearch).
Records that come from NSF Awards carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow NSF Awards's own citation guidance.
