| name | europe-pmc-api |
| description | Search biomedical and life sciences literature via Europe PMC |
| metadata | {"openclaw":{"emoji":"🔍","category":"literature","subcategory":"search","keywords":["academic database search","literature search","citation tracking","field-specific search"],"source":"https://europepmc.org/RestfulWebService"}} |
Europe PMC API Guide
Overview
Europe PMC (PubMed Central) is a free, comprehensive biomedical literature database maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) as part of a network of 32 European funders. It provides access to over 40 million biomedical and life sciences publications, including abstracts from PubMed/MEDLINE, full-text articles from PubMed Central, patents from the European Patent Office, and preprints from biomedical preprint servers.
Europe PMC extends beyond PubMed by integrating additional European content, preprints, and rich text-mined annotations. It provides links to biological databases (UniProt, Protein Data Bank, etc.), grant information from funders, and citation data. The annotation features include gene/protein mentions, disease names, organism identifiers, and chemical entities extracted via machine learning.
The API is free, requires no authentication, and supports 10 requests per second. It returns JSON or XML and offers advanced query syntax with field-specific searches, boolean operators, and date range filters.
Authentication
No authentication required. The Europe PMC API is fully open. No API key, registration, or email is needed. The API enforces a rate limit of 10 requests per second per IP address. Including a descriptive User-Agent header is considered good practice.
Core Endpoints
Search: Full-Text Literature Search
- URL:
GET https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search