Research Paper Search API: arXiv, PubMed & Crossref with Open-Access Full Text

Use this when you or your AI agent need scholarly papers in clean JSON. One call searches arXiv, Crossref (150M+ DOIs) and Europe PMC (every PubMed record, plus PubMed Central and preprints). Results are merged and de-duplicated, with title, authors, year, venue, DOI, arXiv ID, PMID/PMCID, abstract, citation count, open-access status, licence and PDF link. Switch on full text and you also get the paper as Markdown, but only from legal open-access copies under permissive licences.

• 🔎 Three free scholarly databases in one call. Search by keywords, or look up a DOI, arXiv ID, PMID or PMC ID
• 📄 Legal full text. Europe PMC open-access XML, CC BY arXiv papers and CC BY publisher PDFs, converted to clean Markdown for RAG and LLMs
• ⚖️ Copyright-safe by design. Full text is only delivered for CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA or public-domain papers. Everything else gets metadata, the licence and a link. No Google Scholar scraping, no shadow libraries
• 💸 Pay only for results. $0.0015 per paper and $0.01 per full text actually delivered. Empty searches and unavailable full texts are free
• 🤖 Agent-ready. One string input, compact JSON, typical calls finish in 1–5 seconds, and it works with the Apify MCP server and agentic payments

What can I use it for?

• Literature reviews and research agents: find the key papers on a topic, then read the open-access ones in full
• RAG pipelines: feed permissively licensed full texts into your vector database with the licence attached
• Citation checking: confirm that a DOI, title or arXiv ID exists and get correct metadata (stops LLM citation hallucinations)
• Biomedical research: PubMed coverage with PMIDs, PMCIDs and open-access status

Input

Field	What it does
query	Keywords, a DOI (10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2), an arXiv ID (1706.03762), PMID:31452104 or PMC8371605
queries	Optional batch of extra queries
maxResults	Papers per query (default 10, max 100)
includeFullText	Add legal open-access full text as Markdown
openAccessOnly, yearFrom, yearTo	Filters
sources	arxiv, crossref, europepmc (default: all three)

{ "query": "10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2", "includeFullText": true }

Output example

{
  "title": "Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold",
  "authors": ["John Jumper", "Richard Evans", "..."],
  "year": 2021,
  "venue": "Nature",
  "doi": "10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2",
  "pmid": "34265844",
  "pmcid": "PMC8371605",
  "citedByCount": 46513,
  "isOpenAccess": true,
  "licence": "cc-by",
  "url": "https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2",
  "sources": ["crossref", "europepmc"],
  "fullTextStatus": "delivered",
  "fullTextSource": "europepmc-xml",
  "fullText": "# Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold\n\n## Abstract ..."
}

fullTextStatus is one of delivered, not_requested, licence_not_permissive (open but e.g. CC BY-NC or the arXiv default licence, so you get a link only), no_downloadable_copy, not_open_access or fetch_failed. You are charged for full text only when it says delivered.

Use it from the API or with AI agents

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/poised_beardlichen~research-paper-search/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"query": "retrieval augmented generation evaluation", "maxResults": 5}'

from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("poised_beardlichen/research-paper-search").call(run_input={"query": "1706.03762"})
print(list(client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items()))

MCP: add https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=poised_beardlichen/research-paper-search to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client. AI agents can also pay per call through Apify agentic payments, with no Apify account needed.

Pricing

Event	Price
Paper returned (metadata)	$0.0015
Open-access full text delivered	$0.01

10 papers cost $0.015. Searches with no results, and full texts that are unavailable or not permissively licensed, cost nothing. Set Maximum cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly at your limit.

FAQ

Why don't I get full text for every open-access paper? Many "free to read" papers do not allow redistribution (for example CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND or arXiv's default licence). For those we return the licence and a link to the publisher's or arXiv's own copy, so you can read it there.

Do you use Google Scholar or Sci-Hub? No. Only the official, free APIs of arXiv, Crossref and Europe PMC.

Is PubMed included? Yes. Europe PMC indexes every PubMed record and adds PubMed Central full texts and preprints.

How fresh is the data? Each call queries the live APIs, so new papers appear as soon as the databases index them.

What about citation counts? They come from Crossref and Europe PMC and can differ from Google Scholar.

How fast is it? A keyword search of 10 papers usually takes 1–3 seconds. Full text adds about 1–2 seconds per paper (arXiv requests are paced to respect arXiv's rate limits).

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Support

Found a wrong result or a missing licence? Open an issue on the Issues tab and we will fix it fast.

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