Europe PMC & PubMed Literature Metadata Exporter

Search life-science and biomedical literature through the official Europe PMC REST API. Turn a topic, author, journal, DOI, PMID, or advanced Europe PMC query into clean dataset rows with abstracts, structured authors, affiliations, citations, MeSH terms, grants, and full-text links.

This HTTP-only Apify Actor needs no customer login, cookie, proxy, or third-party API subscription. It returns metadata, not downloaded article files.

Quick start

1. Enter a literature query.
2. Choose relevance, most cited, or newest first.
3. Keep the result limit small for the first run.
4. Click Start and export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, RSS, or HTML.

{
  "query": "OPEN_ACCESS:Y AND machine learning",
  "sort": "P_PDATE_D desc",
  "expandSynonyms": false,
  "maxItems": 25
}

Query examples

Goal	Query
Topic search	cancer immunotherapy
Author search	AUTH:"Jane Smith"
Journal search	JOURNAL:"Nature Medicine"
Exact DOI	DOI:10.1038/s41591-024-00000-0
Open-access papers	OPEN_ACCESS:Y AND malaria
Papers with abstracts	HAS_ABSTRACT:Y AND microbiome

Europe PMC supports Boolean operators, field qualifiers, identifiers, and date expressions. Use focused queries to reduce noise and cost.

What each result includes

Each publication row can include:

• PMID, PMCID, DOI, source identifier, and Europe PMC URL
• title, abstract, publication types, journal, volume, issue, pages, and dates
• structured authors, ORCID-style identifiers when supplied, and affiliations
• citation count, open-access and full-text availability flags
• keywords, MeSH headings, grants, and full-text links when supplied by Europe PMC
• a retrieval timestamp for repeatable monitoring workflows

Fields remain null when the source does not provide them. The Actor does not invent missing metadata.

Useful workflows

• Literature-review discovery and screening exports
• PubMed, PMCID, and DOI enrichment
• New-publication monitoring by topic, author, institution, or journal
• Open-access evidence discovery
• Citation, grant, affiliation, and research-landscape analysis
• Scheduled feeds for spreadsheets, databases, webhooks, MCP clients, and AI workflows

Reliability and billing design

• Uses Europe PMC's core result type for richer metadata.
• Supports cursor pagination without duplicating records within a run.
• Bounds default and maximum result counts to prevent accidental runaway jobs.
• Retries temporary rate limits and server errors with exponential backoff.
• Fails loudly on unexpected source response shapes instead of returning a misleading empty success.
• Charges only for successfully written dataset rows when pay-per-result pricing is enabled.
• Stops cleanly when an Apify maximum-charge limit is reached.

Data source and limitations

Source documentation: https://dev.europepmc.org/RestfulWebService

Europe PMC aggregates records from sources that include PubMed and PubMed Central. Coverage, citation counts, update timing, and field completeness can differ from Scopus, Web of Science, a publisher's site, or the final article. Full-text links indicate source-reported availability; this Actor does not grant access rights or download papers.

This independent community Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by Europe PMC, EMBL-EBI, PubMed, PMC, or the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Users remain responsible for interpreting and using the data lawfully.