PubMed API — biomedical literature search (no key)

Search PubMed — the U.S. National Library of Medicine's 37M+ biomedical citations — behind a clean HTTP API (and MCP tool). Search by keywords, author and year, sort by relevance or recency, and fetch a full article by PMID with its abstract, authors, journal and DOI. Built for medical & life-sciences research, evidence synthesis, pharma, and AI agents. No API key. Pay per query.

• 🔎 Search — keywords + author + year range; PubMed field tags (e.g. [MeSH], [Author]) are supported in the term.
• 📄 Article — PMID → title, authors, journal, volume/issue/pages, DOI, PMCID, publication types and the abstract.
• 📅 Recency or relevance — sort newest-first or by PubMed relevance.
• 🧬 Official & keyless — straight from NCBI E-utilities.
• 💵 Pay per query.

The use case it was built for

"Find recent CRISPR off-target papers by Doudna", or resolve a PMID to a clean citation with abstract for a literature review or an agent's evidence step. Two calls, clean JSON, no key.

Sample output (search, term "crispr gene editing")

{
  "ok": true, "term": "crispr gene editing", "totalResults": 25401, "count": 1,
  "articles": [
    { "pmid": "31295471", "title": "…", "authors": ["Doudna JA"],
      "journal": "Nature", "pubDate": "2019 Jul", "doi": "10.1038/…",
      "publicationTypes": ["Review"], "url": "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31295471/" }
  ]
}

How to use

• HTTP API (Standby): POST or GET /search, /article. GET / returns help. Example: GET /search?term=alzheimer%20biomarkers&sort=recent.
• Normal run: pass { operation, term | pmid, ... }; results land in the dataset + key-value store.
• MCP tool: expose it to your agent via Apify's MCP server.

Input

• operation — search · article.
• term — keywords (field tags allowed). author — surname + initials. sort — relevance / recent. fromYear / toYear — publication-year range. limit — cap articles.
• pmid — for article.

Pricing

Per query from $0.005 (down to $0.0015 on higher tiers). One call = one query (search returns many articles at once).

Related Actors

• Crossref API — scholarly works and DOI metadata across all publishers.
• ClinicalTrials.gov API — clinical studies search.

FAQ

Do I need a key? No — this uses NCBI's public E-utilities with a polite tool/email identifier.

Can I use PubMed syntax? Yes — put field tags in term (e.g. asthma[MeSH] AND 2023[pdat]).

Are abstracts included? Yes, in the article operation (when the publisher deposited one). Full text is at the article link/DOI.

Notes & limits

Data from NCBI PubMed (E-utilities). Up to 50 articles per search call. NCBI rate-limits to 3 requests/second without a key; this actor stays within that.