Ask HN: Retrieve full author names for a large volume of medical papers?

For a meta analysis I need to retrieve the full author names for around 10k medical papers. Unfortunately, most databases only have the authors listed with their initials + last names.

Some websites (like ResearchGate) list full names but usually only for a subset of the authors. Also, doing a Google search like “{author_last_name_with_initials} full name {institute_name}” usually returns the full name of the author somewhere in the search results.

My current approach would be to (Python script):

* Retrieve the desired list of papers through the PubMed eutils API (gives me the title, the PMID and the DOI for every paper)

* Use the PMID to retrieve the metadata for every paper through the PubMed eutils API (gives me the last names of their authors, their initials and their institutes)

* Use Google Search via SerpApi, search for the term “{author_last_name_with_initials} full name {institute_name}”, forward the resulting JSON to a LLM, ask it to return the full name of the author and the link to the source

I tried this approach with a few papers and it seems to work. However, I wonder if there is a more elegant solution to this problem. I was not able to find a free, API-accessible service that provides this kind of information.