PubMed Citation Lookup & Search (PMID, DOI, NCBI)

Search PubMed or look up PMIDs in bulk through the official NCBI E-utilities API. Get clean citation records: title, authors, journal, publication date, volume/issue/pages, DOI, PMC ID, publication types, PMC citation count and link. Export JSON, CSV or Excel.

Use cases

• Researchers and librarians: build reference lists from PMIDs or search queries.
• Biotech and pharma analysts: monitor new literature on a topic.
• Data teams: enrich PMID columns with DOI, journal and date.
• AI agents: structured literature lookups via API or MCP.

How it works

1. PMIDs go straight to NCBI ESummary; other lines are run as PubMed searches via ESearch.
2. Every request carries NCBI's tool and email identification parameters, and requests are paced to at most about 2.6 per second (NCBI's limit is 3 per second without an API key).
3. One flat record per article is written; this returns citation metadata, not abstracts or full text.
4. Each article returned is one billed event.

Input

{
  "queries": [
    "37000000",
    "CRISPR base editing"
  ],
  "maxPerQuery": 3,
  "sort": "relevance"
}

Empty input {} runs a small demo. Other options: maxPerQuery, sort, maxResults, concurrency.

Output (one item per result)

{
  "pmid": "37000000",
  "title": "Single-Time-Point Dosimetry of (177)Lu-PSMA-617 Radionuclide Therapy with SPECT/CT.",
  "firstAuthor": "Burkett BJ",
  "journal": "Radiology. Imaging cancer",
  "pubDate": "2023 Mar",
  "doi": "10.1148/rycan.239006",
  "pmcid": "PMC10077076",
  "url": "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37000000/",
  "error": null
}

Example output

Real output from a default run (some fields omitted for width):

pmid	title	firstAuthor	journalAbbrev	pubDate	doi
38308006	CRISPR technologies for genome, epigenome and transcriptome editing.	Villiger L	Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol	2024 Jun	10.1038/s41580-023-00697-6

Every run also produces a ready-made table view in the Output tab, and you can export to JSON, CSV or Excel.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.002 per article record ($2.00 per 1,000). Duplicates, failed lookups and empty results are not charged.

FAQ

Is this legal? It uses the free public NCBI E-utilities API as NCBI's usage policy describes: requests go to eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, stay under 3 per second, and include the tool and email parameters. Only bibliographic metadata is returned, not abstracts or full text, which publishers or authors may copyright. NCBI's policy asks that large jobs (over 100 requests) run on weekends or 9 pm-5 am US Eastern on weekdays; the Actor does not schedule this for you, so schedule big runs accordingly. Data is provided as-is: NCBI makes no warranty about its accuracy or completeness, does not endorse this Actor, and nothing here is medical advice. See the NCBI Disclaimer and Copyright notice. This Actor is not affiliated with NCBI or NLM.

Why no abstracts? Abstracts can carry publisher copyright; this Actor returns citation metadata only and links to the PubMed page.

Are failures charged? No. Errors and queries with no match are not charged.

Limitations

Metadata only (no abstracts, MeSH terms or full text). Runs are paced at about 2.6 requests per second to respect NCBI limits (each search query costs two requests), so 1,000 queries take roughly 15-20 minutes.

About

Built and maintained by Winters Works. Questions or feature requests: open an issue on the Actor page or email wintersworks.shop@gmail.com.