Jikan is a PHP & REST API for MyAnimeList. It has two main parts: a PHP library, which has several methods to scrape and parse a lot of data from MyAnimeList's desktop version; and a REST API, which uses the previous PHP library and provides a public API to obtain certain data from MyAnimeList (in json format).

To avoid overloading MyAnimeList, the REST API uses an internal MongoDB Database to store and cache previously scraped data. Some entries are updated automatically once/day, others only when asked from the REST API. This dataset consists of the scraping of the 4 main collections from the REST API cached database: Animes, Characters, Mangas and People.

The scraping was done on 17 July 2022 and it took slightly less than 3 hours 30 minutes. The scraping process is really really simple and is uploaded in GitHub.

It contains the information of:

• 24 640 Animes
• 146 049 Characters
• 66 371 Mangas
• 16 943 People

The cleaning process is a bit longer and it's also explained in the GitHub. Basically it consists in simplifying dictionary columns, adjusting some old values and adding two new columns (nsfw and pending_approval).

In the near future I'll post a more complete Dataset relating the Characters & Staff with Anime and Manga and the Relations between Animes and Mangas, and I'll be updating that weekly, but that version will have a lot more complicated code and take a lot longer to scrape (over 1 day, and I will scrape too the MyAnimeList official API to know which Animes / Mangas have been updated to update only modified entries), so this is the preliminary and beautifully simple Jikan only version.

Thanks a lot to Jikan API, studying their API architecture was quite fun, and the scraped data from MyAnimeList is awesome.