PubMed Scraper - Biomedical Articles & Metadata

Search PubMed and get clean, structured rows for every biomedical article: title, journal, authors, publication date, DOI, volume/issue/pages, ISSN and publication types. Search by keyword (or PubMed field tags), or fetch exact articles by PMID. Built on the official NCBI E-utilities API - no key, no browser.

What you get per article

Field	Meaning
title / journal / journalAbbrev	Article title and journal (full + abbreviated)
authors / lastAuthor	Author list and the senior (last) author
pubDate / epubDate	Print and electronic publication dates
doi / pmcId / pmid	DOI, PubMed Central ID, PubMed ID
volume / issue / pages / issn	Citation details
pubTypes / pubmedUrl / doiUrl	Publication types and direct links

Input

{ "searchQueries": ["cancer immunotherapy"], "maxItemsPerQuery": 100, "sortBy": "date" }

• Search queries - one per line. Plain terms work, and so do PubMed field tags: cancer[Title], Smith J[Author], 2024[pdat], clinical trial[pt].
• PMIDs - or fetch specific articles by PubMed ID.
• Import from a file - paste a whole list, or link a public .txt/.csv, a Google Sheet/Drive link, or an Apify key-value-store record.
• Sort by relevance, publication date, or first author. Max articles per query / total bound the run.
• Output fields - tick only the columns you want.

Leave everything empty and the run returns a small free sample so you can see the shape first.

Reliability

Reads the official NCBI E-utilities API - public JSON, no key, no proxy, no anti-bot. The actor paces requests to stay within NCBI's 3-requests-per-second guidance. A run that returns nothing bills $0.

Honest limits

• Citation metadata, not full text. You get the article's bibliographic record (title, journal, authors, DOI, IDs); the full text lives at the publisher or PubMed Central via the links.
• pmcId is present only for articles indexed in PubMed Central; doi and epubDate follow what the record publishes. These vary by article, not by extraction.

Pricing

$0.002 per article on the FREE tier (tiered pricing lowers it with volume). Only articles actually saved are billed; an empty run costs nothing.

Output views

• Articles - title, journal, authors, date, DOI, PMID and the PubMed link.

Use with AI assistants (MCP)

Available through the Apify MCP server - an agent can pull the latest literature on a condition or drug (with DOIs) for a review or evidence-synthesis pipeline.

Agent-ready: autonomous payments (x402 & Skyfire)

This actor is agent-ready - AI agents can discover it, run it, and pay for it autonomously, with no Apify account and no human in the loop. It uses pay-per-event pricing and limited permissions, so it qualifies for Apify's agentic-payment standards:

• x402 - an open, HTTP-native payment protocol. Agents pay per run in USDC on the Base network directly through the Apify MCP server - no account, no API key.
• Skyfire - agent-to-service payments for fully autonomous AI-agent workflows.

Building an AI agent, MCP tool, or autonomous data pipeline? This scraper is ready to plug in and pay as it goes.