PubMed Article Scraper — Medical Research & Paper Metadata Extractor

Extract medical and life sciences research article metadata from PubMed using the official NCBI E-utilities API. This Actor retrieves titles, authors, journal names, publication dates, DOIs, and optional abstracts for any PubMed search query — no scraping required, no proxy costs, 100% reliable.

Use Cases

• Systematic Literature Reviews — Collect article metadata for meta-analysis and review papers
• Research Trend Analysis — Track publication trends in specific medical fields over time
• Citation Mining — Build datasets of relevant papers for bibliometric analysis
• Drug & Disease Monitoring — Stay updated on latest research for specific conditions or treatments
• Academic Research — Gather structured publication data for machine learning or NLP projects

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
searchQuery	String	Yes	Search terms to query PubMed (e.g., "machine learning diabetes")
maxResults	Number	No	Maximum articles to extract, 1–1000 (default: 100)
sort	String	No	Sort by relevance or pubDate (default: relevance)
dateRange	String	No	Filter by year range, e.g. 2020:2025 or 2024
includeAbstract	Boolean	No	Fetch article abstracts (slower, extra API calls)
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	Proxy configuration (not required for NCBI API)

Output

The Actor outputs a dataset with the following fields:

{
  "pmid": "42117144",
  "title": "Cardiovascular Risk Stratification in Youth-Onset Type 2 Diabetes Using Machine Learning.",
  "authors": ["Joo EY", "Lee YS", "Shin EJ", "Kim SJ", "Lee JE"],
  "journal": "J Korean Med Sci",
  "pubDate": "2026 May 11",
  "volume": "41",
  "issue": "18",
  "pages": "e4",
  "doi": "10.3346/jkms.2026.41.e4",
  "language": "eng",
  "abstract": "",
  "pubTypes": ["Journal Article"]
}

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per article extracted (minimum charge applies).

NCBI E-utilities is a free public API with no proxy or scraping costs, giving this Actor margins above 95%.

Limitations

• Abstract fetching requires additional API calls and is slower
• NCBI rate limits: ~3 requests/second without an API key
• Very large result sets (>1000) require multiple search strategies
• Some older articles may have incomplete metadata

FAQ

Q: Do I need an NCBI API key? A: No. This Actor works with the public E-utilities API. An API key increases rate limits but is not required.

Q: Can I search by author or journal? A: Yes. Use PubMed search syntax in searchQuery, e.g., Smith J[Author] AND Nature[Journal].

Q: Why are some abstracts empty? A: Not all PubMed records include abstracts. Enable includeAbstract to attempt fetching them.

Changelog

• v1.0.0 — Initial release with search, metadata extraction, and optional abstract fetching