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.

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": "…"
}

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.

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.