Our World in Data Scraper

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Scrape Our World in Data — the Oxford/Global Change Data Lab platform covering global trends in health, poverty, climate, education, and more. Extract article metadata, downloadable chart datasets (CSV), and country profiles — all without any API key or credentials.

What You Can Scrape

• Articles — browse recent research articles with title, authors, publish date, excerpt, thumbnail, and related chart slugs.
• Chart Data — download the underlying dataset (CSV rows) for any OWID Grapher chart by its slug, with optional country/year filters.
• Chart Data Bulk — download datasets from multiple charts in one run.
• Countries — browse country profiles (250+ countries) with name, description, and related charts.

Output Fields

Article records (recordType: "article")

Chart config records (recordType: "chartConfig")

Chart data rows (recordType: "chartDataRow")

Country records (recordType: "country")

Input Parameters

Example Inputs

Browse latest articles about climate change

{
"mode":"articles",
"searchQuery":"climate change",
"maxItems":20
}

Download life expectancy data for Germany and France (1950–2023)

{
"mode":"chartData",
"chartSlug":"life-expectancy",
"entities":["Germany","France"],
"yearFrom":1950,
"yearTo":2023,
"maxItems":500
}

Bulk download multiple charts

{
"mode":"chartDataBulk",
"chartSlugs":["co2-emissions-vs-gdp","child-mortality","global-education"],
"entities":["World"],
"maxItems":1000
}

Browse country profiles

{
"mode":"countries",
"searchQuery":"germany",
"maxItems":10
}

Use Cases

• Research & academia — download multi-decade global datasets (CO₂, life expectancy, GDP, mortality) for analysis.
• Journalism — find the latest OWID articles on a topic and enrich stories with chart data.
• Education — build classroom materials using OWID's curated global statistics.
• Data pipelines — automate ingestion of specific chart datasets on a schedule.
• Content discovery — monitor new articles published on specific topics.

Finding Chart Slugs

Chart slugs appear in every OWID chart URL: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/{slug}.

Popular examples:

• life-expectancy — Life expectancy at birth (1950–2024)
• co2-emissions-vs-gdp — CO₂ emissions vs. GDP per capita
• child-mortality — Child mortality rate by country
• global-education — Years of schooling
• share-of-population-in-extreme-poverty — Poverty headcount ratio
• annual-co-emissions-by-region — Annual CO₂ by region
• vaccination-coverage-who-unicef — Vaccine coverage

FAQ

Does this require an API key? No. All OWID data is publicly available. No registration or API key is needed.

How many articles are available? OWID publishes 1,900+ articles and research topics. The Atom feed provides the 10 most recent; setting maxItems higher triggers sitemap crawling for older content.

How many chart datasets are available? OWID hosts 3,000+ Grapher charts. Each has a downloadable CSV via the .csv endpoint.

What is the largest chart dataset? Multi-country charts spanning 200+ years can have 50,000+ rows. Use entities and yearFrom/yearTo filters to limit output.

Can I get data for a specific country over time? Yes — use chartData mode with entities: ["Germany"] and yearFrom/yearTo to extract time-series data for a single country.

Is there rate limiting? OWID's public API is politely crawled with 0.3s delays between requests. No API rate limits apply to static CSV/JSON endpoints.