Process / pipelineData collection

API-based Data Collection — Programmatic Research Data Retrieval

API-based data collection is a systematic technique in which a researcher sends structured requests to an application programming interface to retrieve data automatically from digital platforms, databases, or services. It is the primary method used in computational social science to gather large-scale social media records, government open data, financial data streams, and scientific repository content in machine-readable formats such as JSON or XML, enabling reproducible and scalable data acquisition that manual collection cannot match.

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Sources

  1. Salganik, M. J. (2018). Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691158648
  2. Ruths, D., & Pfeffer, J. (2014). Social media for large studies of behavior. Science, 346(6213), 1063–1064. DOI: 10.1126/science.346.6213.1063

Related methods

Referenced by

ScholarGateAPI-based Data Collection (Application Programming Interface-based Data Collection). Retrieved 2026-06-04 from https://scholargate.app/en/survey-methodology/api-based-data-collection