PubMed Articles Scraper: Authors, Journals, DOIs & PMIDs

PubMed Articles Scraper — Authors, Journals & DOIs

Search PubMed and get one row per article: title, the full author list, journal, volume/issue/pages, a bare DOI with a resolvable link, PMCID, publication types and languages.

Full PubMed query syntax. No API key, no account. $0.008 per article — a search that matches nothing is recorded and not charged.

Input

{ "query": "crispr AND 2024[pdat]", "maxArticles": 100, "sort": "date" }

Bulk:

{ "queries": ["semaglutide", "\"Smith J\"[au] AND cardiology"], "maxArticles": 50 }

Field	Type	Notes
query	string	Any PubMed query — crispr AND 2024[pdat], "Smith J"[au], MeSH terms.
queries	string[]	Up to 10 searches per run.
maxArticles	integer	1–500 per search. You are charged per article returned.
sort	enum	relevance, date, author, journal.
apiKey	string	Optional NCBI key — see Limits.

Output

{
  "ok": true,
  "pmid": "25315507",
  "url": "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25315507/",
  "title": "Genome modification by CRISPR/Cas9.",
  "authors": ["Ma Y", "Zhang L", "Huang X"],
  "firstAuthor": "Ma Y",
  "journal": "The FEBS journal",
  "pubDateRaw": "2014 Dec",
  "pubDate": null,
  "pubYear": 2014,
  "volume": "281", "issue": "23", "pages": "5186-93",
  "doi": "10.1111/febs.13110",
  "doiUrl": "https://doi.org/10.1111/febs.13110",
  "pmcid": null,
  "publicationTypes": ["Journal Article", "Review"],
  "languages": ["eng"],
  "totalMatches": 70754
}

What it gets right

• ⭐ Partial dates are not invented. PubMed prints "2014 Dec" when the issue was monthly. pubDateRaw keeps exactly what the source said, pubDate stays null unless a full day exists, and pubYear is always there for filtering. No article gets a fake 1st-of-the-month.
• The DOI is bare and the link works. PubMed returns "doi: 10.1111/…" in elocationid; the prefix is stripped and doiUrl is built from the cleaned value.
• ⚠️ esummary returns a map keyed by id plus a uids array. Iterating its values naively emits that array as a bogus, title-less record — which you would then be billed for. This walks the ids it asked for, in order, and the promise spec asserts every pmid is numeric.
• totalMatches tells you how big the literature is, so you know whether 25 rows is the whole answer or the tip of 70,000.
• Two calls, batched. esearch for ids, then esummary in batches of 200 — not one request per article.

Example

A real run on 2026-10-31 with the input this page's form is prefilled with:

{
  "query": "crispr",
  "queries": []
}

It finished in 3 seconds and returned 25 results. It was charged for 25 article-scraped events ($0.20 on the Free plan). Each result has these fields (values are not shown here because they include people's names or contact details):

Field	Type
ok	boolean
query	string
pmid	string
url	string
title	string
authors	array
firstAuthor	string
lastAuthor	string
journal	string
journalAbbrev	string
pubDateRaw	string
pubDate	null
pubYear	number
volume	string
issue	string
pages	string
doi	string
doiUrl	string
pmcid	null
issn	string
publicationTypes	array
languages	array
citedByCount	null
totalMatches	number

Pricing

$0.008 per article returned. No start fee. A search matching nothing produces an articleCount: 0 record with totalMatches and is not charged.

Limits

• NCBI allows 3 requests/second per IP without a key and 10/second with one. Runs here are small and batched, so the keyless limit is usually fine; supply apiKey (free from your NCBI account) for heavy use.
• 10 searches per run, up to 500 articles each.
• Returns citation metadata, not abstracts or full text. Use the pmcid for open-access full text via PubMed Central.
• citedByCount is PubMed Central's reference count where available, not a Scopus/WoS citation count.

FAQ

Do I need an NCBI API key? No.

Can I get abstracts? Not in this Actor — it returns citation metadata.

Does PubMed query syntax work? Yes, including field tags ([au], [pdat], [mesh]) and boolean operators.

Changelog

• 2026-11-01: Page text only: an Example section from a real run. Code, output and price are unchanged.
• 0.1 (2026-09-10) — first release. One row per article, batched esummary, bare DOIs with resolvable links, partial dates preserved, bulk searches.

Who uses it

• Researchers building a literature list for a review with full PubMed query syntax
• Medical writers collecting authors, journals and DOIs for citations
• Biotech and pharma analysts tracking publications on a target or compound
• Librarians exporting article metadata for a topic
• Developers and AI agents that need PubMed records as structured rows