Author-affiliations: A Python Tool for NSF Proposal Writers

Preparing National Science Foundation (NSF) proposals is time-consuming, and one of the more tedious tasks is compiling long co-author lists and their institutional affiliations for the required COA document. To make that easier, I built author-affiliations, a small Python tool that automates this labor-intensive step.

You just start with a manuscript list exported from ORCID, and the script does the rest: it uses manuscript author names, DOIs (if available), and titles to pull structured metadata from Crossref and OpenAlex, resolving institutional affiliations with fallback logic and batching to stay API-friendly.

I was inspired by Benjamin M. Gyori's nsf_coa repo; I take a different approach that is suited for those of us in fields where our manuscripts aren't reliably indexed by PubMed.

I hope it will spare someone else a few hours of spreadsheet pain!