Nobel Prizes API

About the Nobel Prizes API

Nobel Prizes is a Nobel Prize API for looking up laureates by first name, last name or award category. Queries match laureates in one of six official categories: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. You get back matching laureate names, prize years and categories, plus how many results came back and which filters were applied.

It works as a Nobel Prize database behind quiz and trivia apps, education sites, history timelines and research tools, for questions like who won the physics Nobel Prize or which Peace prize winners share a surname.

The Free plan searches by name and category. Paid plans add filtering by award year, and each record gains the official motivation, the affiliated organization with its city and country, gender, and birth and death dates and places.

How it works

Searches run against a stored copy of the laureate dataset; there are no live calls to an outside service. At least one of firstname, lastname, category or year is required, otherwise the request returns a 400.

Every filter is a substring match, applied in order and combined with AND; name and category matching ignore case. lastname=curie therefore matches every laureate whose surname contains "curie", firstname=mar matches Marie and Martin, and category=med matches Medicine. year (paid) is also matched as text, so a full four-digit year gives an exact year, while a shorter value matches more broadly. filteredOn lists the fields that were actually used.

Results are capped at 10 and returned in dataset order, not by relevance or date. count is the number of records in this response, not the total number of matches, so a broad query like category=physics returns 10 and a count of 10; narrow it with a name or year to reach a specific laureate. No match returns a 404.

year is returned as a string. Death fields are empty for living laureates, and organization fields are empty where no affiliation is recorded.

What people use it for

Academic Trivia Games

Trivia apps query specific prize categories to generate questions and verify player answers against historical winners and award years.

Science Journalism Portals

When breaking news covers major scientific breakthroughs, newsrooms search laureate records by name to confirm previous award years and official citations.

University Faculty Profiles

To display faculty honors accurately, university web editors cross-reference researcher names against prize records to list confirmed Nobel awards.

Reference Library Catalogs

Catalogers query the database by category to build curated reading lists and link literature prize winners to archive collections.

Ways to call it

One endpoint, many ways in — REST with JSON, XML, YAML and CSV, plus GraphQL and an MCP interface for AI agents.

JSON

Default REST response

XML

Markup format

YAML

Human-readable

CSV

Tabular export

Beta

GraphQL

Query language

New

MCP

For AI agents

Request parameters — GET /v1/nobelprizes

Sent in the query string. Premium parameters are accepted on every plan but only take effect on plans that include them. Anything not listed here is dropped rather than passed through.

Optional

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curl "https://api.apiverve.com/v1/nobelprizes?firstname=Albert&lastname=Einstein&category=Physics&year=1921" \
  -H "x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Authentication

Send your key in the x-api-key header. That is the only auth step — no token exchange, and no per-endpoint scope to configure.

Response — GET /v1/nobelprizes

Every APIVerve endpoint returns the same three top-level keys, so one response handler covers your whole integration: status, error and data. Only data changes shape.

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{
  "status": "ok",
  "error": null,
  "data": {
    "count": 1,
    "filteredOn": [
      "firstName",
      "lastName",
      "category",
      "year"
    ],
    "nobelPrizes": [
      {
        "firstName": "Albert",
        "lastName": "Einstein",
        "born": "1879-03-14",
        "died": "1955-04-18",
        "countryborn": "Germany",
        "countrybornCode": "DE",
        "born city": "Ulm",
        "diedCountry": "USA",
        "diedCountryCode": "US",
        "diedCity": "Princeton NJ",
        "gender": "male",
        "year": "1921",
        "category": "Physics",
        "motivation": "for his services to Theoretical Physics and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect",
        "organization": "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (now Max-Planck-Institut) für Physik",
        "organizationCity": "Berlin",
        "organizationCountry": "Germany"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Response fields

Paths are relative to data. Premium fields are absent rather than zeroed on plans that do not include them, so check for presence instead of comparing to 0.

Response headers

Every response carries your balance, so your own code always knows where it stands without polling anything. All four are exposed to browsers through CORS.

Errors

Read the HTTP status first, then error for the specific reason. The body names the parameter that has to change.

What a call costs — 2 credits per call

Credits are shared across every APIVerve API — one balance, one key, one bill. Failed requests never count against it, so a rejected input costs nothing.

Calls are what the credits buy at this API's rate — spend them here, on any of the other APIs, or across both. Nothing is reserved per endpoint.

Zero-code embed — one snippet, no backend

Drop an interactive Nobel Prizes form onto any page. The widget calls the API for you, so no key ever appears in your markup and there is nothing to deploy.

Changelog — Nobel Prizes API

Every change to this endpoint, newest first. Breaking changes ship as a new version and the previous one keeps serving — response fields are added, never removed or retyped in place, so an integration written against v1 keeps working.

Currently v1