PubMed Article Monitor

Monitor new scientific articles in PubMed by keyword, MeSH term, author, journal or any other PubMed query, through the official NCBI E-utilities. No HTML scraping, no API key required at three requests per second, no bypass of any protection.

Use it as a one-off search or as a scheduled watch that only returns new articles since the last run.

Sources (official):

• esearch.fcgi — find PMIDs
• esummary.fcgi — document summaries
• efetch.fcgi — full Medline records (title, authors, journal, date, DOI, abstract, MeSH)

Every request sends the tool and email parameters NCBI asks for, and the Actor stays at or below 3 requests per second without a key (or 10 r/s if you provide your own NCBI API key).

Why this Actor

PubMed is the standard bibliographic database for biomedical and life-science literature. This Actor turns a PubMed search into a clean, Google-Sheets-ready dataset:

• Familiar query language — any PubMed term, including field tags such as [Title], [Author], [Journal] or [MeSH Terms].
• Publication type and date window — filter to journal articles, reviews, trials, preprints and more; default window is the last 7 days on the Entrez entry date (edat), which is what you want for a "what's new" monitor.
• Incremental monitoring — sinceLastRun + onlyNew store seen PMIDs and the last date in a key-value store, so a daily schedule only costs you the new rows.
• Flat, useful rows — title, authors, journal, date, DOI, PMID, abstract, MeSH terms and the official PubMed link.
• Digest and webhook — an email-friendly markdown digest is saved to the key-value store; optionally POSTed to a URL you provide. The Actor never sends email itself.

Use cases

• Topic watch — schedule a daily run for mRNA vaccine, CRISPR[Title] or a MeSH term, and forward the digest to Slack or Make via webhookUrl.
• Author or journal alerts — follow a lab (Smith J[Author]) or a journal (Nature[Journal]) without leaving PubMed's official API.
• Evidence reviews — pull 30 or 90 days of systematic reviews and meta-analyses into a spreadsheet, with abstracts and MeSH already filled in.
• RAG / research pipelines — drop new papers into a dataset on a schedule, with DOI and abstract ready for downstream tools.

Input highlights

Field	What it does
query	PubMed search term (mRNA vaccine, CRISPR[Title], Smith J[Author])
publicationTypes	Journal Article, Review, Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis, Clinical Trial, RCT, Preprint, …
dateType	edat (entry date, default), pdat (publication date), mhdat, mdat
datePreset	last_24_hours, last_7_days (default), last_30_days, last_90_days, ytd, custom, since_last_run
sinceLastRun + onlyNew + monitorKey	Incremental watch; use a distinct monitorKey per schedule
webhookUrl	HTTPS endpoint that receives the digest of new articles
maxItems	1–10 000, default 100
tool / email	Official E-utilities identification (defaults are filled in)
ncbiApiKey	Optional; only needed above 3 requests per second

The default date window is the last 7 days, so a run never asks PubMed for the entire archive.

Example: new mRNA-vaccine papers this week

{
  "query": "mRNA vaccine",
  "publicationTypes": ["Journal Article", "Review"],
  "datePreset": "last_7_days",
  "dateType": "edat",
  "sinceLastRun": false,
  "maxItems": 50,
  "includeDigest": true,
  "monitorKey": "mrna-vaccine"
}

Example: incremental daily watch

{
  "query": "CRISPR[Title]",
  "publicationTypes": ["Journal Article"],
  "datePreset": "since_last_run",
  "dateType": "edat",
  "sinceLastRun": true,
  "onlyNew": true,
  "maxItems": 200,
  "webhookUrl": "https://example.com/hooks/pubmed",
  "monitorKey": "crispr-title-daily"
}

Output

Each dataset item is one article. The most useful fields:

Field	Contents
pmid	PubMed identifier
title	Article title
authors / authorsText	Author list, and the same names joined with ;
journal / journalAbbrev	Full journal title and ISO abbreviation
publicationDate	Best available date (YYYY-MM-DD when the day is known)
doi / doiUrl	Digital Object Identifier and https://doi.org/…
abstract	Abstract, with labelled sections kept (BACKGROUND: …)
meshTerms / meshHeadings	MeSH descriptors, and descriptor/qualifier pairs
publicationTypes	e.g. Journal Article, Review
link / pubmedUrl	Official record, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/{pmid}/
pmcid / pmcUrl	PubMed Central id and link, when the article is in PMC
isNew	true if this PMID was not in the monitor's seen list

A markdown digest of new articles is written to the key-value store as digest.md.

Pricing and fair use

This Actor is published free. A later pay-per-event price of $3 per 1,000 articles is documented only as a proposal and is not enabled.

The Actor uses the official NCBI E-utilities. Please keep scheduled runs reasonable (a daily or hourly watch on a focused query is fine; do not harvest the entire database). Large jobs should follow NCBI's usage guidelines: identify yourself with tool and email, stay within the rate limit, and prefer evenings and weekends in US Eastern time for very large downloads.

Changelog

• 0.1 — First public version. esearch + efetch, filters, onlyNew / sinceLastRun, digest, webhook.