Europe PMC Scraper — Life-Science Papers & Full Text

Bulk-scrape biomedical and life-science literature from Europe PMC — a 40M+ record index spanning PubMed, PubMed Central, preprints, patents and agricultural literature. Get titles, abstracts, authors, journals, years, DOIs, PMIDs/PMCIDs, citation counts, MeSH terms, open-access flags and direct full-text / PDF links. Thousands of records per run. No account, no API key. Export to JSON, CSV or Excel.

Features

• 🔎 Broad life-science coverage — PubMed + PMC + preprints + patents in one search
• 📄 Full-text & PDF links — direct links where the article is openly available
• 📈 Citation counts — citedByCount per article
• 🏷️ Rich metadata — MeSH terms, keywords, publication types, journal, IDs (DOI/PMID/PMCID)
• 🔓 Open-access filter — restrict to freely readable articles
• 📊 Bulk & cursor-paginated — scales to hundreds of thousands of records per query

What you get

One record per article.

{
  "id": "38512345",
  "source": "MED",
  "pmid": "38512345",
  "pmcId": "PMC10987654",
  "doi": "10.1038/s41586-024-00000-0",
  "title": "…",
  "authors": ["Jane A Smith", "…"],
  "journal": "Nature",
  "pubYear": 2024,
  "citedByCount": 37,
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "hasPdf": true,
  "pdfUrl": "https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC10987654?pdf=render",
  "fullTextUrl": "https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC10987654",
  "meshTerms": ["…"],
  "url": "https://europepmc.org/article/MED/38512345",
  "abstract": "…"
}

Output schema

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Europe PMC internal record ID.
source	string	Source database code (e.g. MED, PMC, PPR).
pmid	string	PubMed ID.
pmcId	string	PubMed Central ID.
doi	string	Digital Object Identifier.
title	string	Article title.
authors	array	List of author names.
authorCount	integer	Number of authors.
journal	string	Journal or source title.
pubYear	integer	Publication year.
volume	string	Journal volume.
issue	string	Journal issue.
citedByCount	integer	Number of citing articles.
isOpenAccess	boolean	Whether the article is open access.
hasPdf	boolean	Whether a PDF is available.
pdfUrl	string (URL)	Direct PDF link where available.
fullTextUrl	string (URL)	Full-text (HTML) link where available.
pubTypes	array	Publication type labels.
meshTerms	array	MeSH subject terms.
keywords	array	Author-supplied keywords.
language	string	Article language.
url	string (URL)	Public Europe PMC article page.
abstract	string	Abstract text (when included).

Input

{
  "query": "crispr AND cancer",
  "openAccessOnly": false,
  "maxResults": 5000
}

Field	Description
query	Europe PMC query (supports fields like AUTH:, JOURNAL:, PUB_YEAR:, booleans).
openAccessOnly	Only open-access articles.
includeAbstract	Include abstract text.
maxResults	Max articles to return.

Use cases

• Systematic & literature reviews — every relevant paper with abstracts and citations
• Full-text mining — grab open-access PDF/HTML links at scale
• Bibliometrics — rank by citations across PubMed + PMC + preprints
• Biomedical datasets — build corpora with MeSH-indexed metadata

Pricing

Pay-per-event: a small amount per article scraped. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. This Actor uses the public Europe PMC REST API — no account, login or API key required.

How many articles can I scrape per run? Set maxResults as high as you need — the API is cursor-paginated and scales to hundreds of thousands of records per query.

Is scraping Europe PMC legal? Yes. Europe PMC openly publishes its life-science index through a public REST API, and this Actor reads only those openly available records and returns them as-is.

What format is the output? Structured JSON — one record per article — exportable as JSON, CSV or Excel. Each record includes title, abstract, authors, journal, year, DOI, PMID/PMCID, citation count, MeSH terms, open-access flags and direct full-text/PDF links.

Can I filter by open access or use field search? Yes. Flip openAccessOnly to keep only freely readable articles, and the query field supports Europe PMC syntax like AUTH:, JOURNAL:, PUB_YEAR: and booleans.

Can I connect this Actor to other apps? The Europe PMC Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. It works with Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients and MCP. Or use webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Related Actors

Building a biomedical literature dataset? These other hipersoft scrapers pair well with this one:

• PubMed Scraper — biomedical papers, abstracts and MeSH terms from the NLM index
• ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper — bulk clinical trial records, sponsors and locations
• OpenAlex Scraper — 250M+ scholarly works with citations and abstracts
• Crossref Scraper — DOIs, citation counts and metadata from 150M+ works

Notes

Uses the public Europe PMC REST API. Returns its openly-available metadata as-is. This is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Europe PMC or EMBL-EBI.