Europe PMC Scraper

Scrape biomedical & life-science literature from Europe PMC by keyword — title, abstract, authors, journal, publication date, citation counts, DOI/PMID/PMCID, and open-access status. Built on the official Europe PMC REST API: no API key or setup needed.

Search a topic like cancer immunotherapy, get a clean, dated list of matching papers — ready to export to CSV, Excel, or JSON, or to power a literature-monitoring pipeline.

Features

• Official, reliable source — reads the public Europe PMC REST API.
• Rich metadata — abstracts, author lists, journal info, citation counts, and cross-reference IDs (DOI, PMID, PMCID) in every row.
• Filter that matters — restrict by publication year and to open-access papers only.
• Sort your way — by relevance, newest first, or most cited.
• Monitoring-ready — schedule it on your keywords and catch new publications as they land.

Use cases

• Literature reviews — build datasets of papers on a topic, with abstracts and citations.
• Research monitoring — schedule daily/weekly to track new publications in your field.
• Bibliometrics — analyze citation counts and open-access rates across a corpus.
• Reference enrichment — resolve DOI/PMID/PMCID for a set of search terms.

Input

Field	Type	Description
searchQueries	string[]	Search queries, e.g. cancer immunotherapy, CRISPR.
fromYear	integer	Only papers published in/after this year.
openAccessOnly	boolean	Only open-access papers. Default false.
sortBy	enum	relevance, date (newest), or citations (most cited).
maxItems	integer	Max papers per query. Default 100.

Example

{
  "searchQueries": ["cancer immunotherapy", "CRISPR"],
  "fromYear": 2024,
  "openAccessOnly": true,
  "sortBy": "citations",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Output

{
  "id": "40000000",
  "source": "MED",
  "pmid": "40000000",
  "pmcid": "PMC11111111",
  "doi": "10.1000/example.2024.001",
  "title": "Advances in cancer immunotherapy",
  "authors": "Doe J, Smith A, Lee K.",
  "journal": "Nature Reviews Cancer",
  "pubYear": "2024",
  "firstPublicationDate": "2024-03-15",
  "abstract": "This review summarizes recent advances in ...",
  "citedByCount": 42,
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "url": "https://europepmc.org/article/MED/40000000",
  "query": "cancer immunotherapy",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-11T19:00:00.000Z"
}

Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML, or pull it via the Apify API.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.01 per run start (per GB of run memory) plus $0.50 per 1,000 papers. You only pay for papers actually returned. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. The Europe PMC REST API is public and free; this Actor packages it into clean, filtered rows with article links.

Which literature does it cover? Europe PMC indexes biomedical and life-science literature, including PubMed/MEDLINE, PubMed Central, preprints, and patents.

Can I get only open-access papers? Yes — enable openAccessOnly to add the OPEN_ACCESS:y filter.

Can I monitor for new papers? Yes — schedule the Actor (e.g. daily) with your keywords and sortBy: "date".

Disclaimer

This Actor uses the public Europe PMC REST API. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Europe PMC, EMBL-EBI, or any publisher. The data is public; you are responsible for how you use it.