bioRxiv / medRxiv
bioRxiv and medRxiv are preprint servers for biology and the health sciences, started at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Through ScholarMuse an agent can resolve a bioRxiv or medRxiv DOI to the preprint's metadata. Their API has no keyword search, so preprints from both servers are found by keyword through OpenAlex and Europe PMC instead.
ScholarMuse tools: get_paper. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from bioRxiv / medRxiv.
get_paper
The bioRxiv API is the last source tried, and only for DOIs starting with 10.1101/ or 10.64898/ that OpenAlex, Crossref and Europe PMC could not resolve. Most preprint DOIs are answered by OpenAlex, without the bioRxiv-only fields.
- doi
- Preprint DOI
- authors
- Author names, first 12
- date
- Date the first version was posted
- latestVersionDate
- Date of the latest version
- version
- Latest version number
- venue
- bioRxiv or medRxiv
- category
- Subject category, such as neuroscience
- license
- Licence the authors chose for the preprint
- publishedDoi
- DOI of the journal version, when one exists
- openAccessUrl
- Link to the full-text PDF
- abstract
- Abstract of the latest version, cut at 2,000 characters
What it covers
- Preprints posted on bioRxiv and medRxiv, looked up one DOI at a time.
- The record describes the latest version, dated by the first posting.
- Keyword search of these preprints goes through OpenAlex and Europe PMC, which index both servers.
Limits
- No keyword search against the bioRxiv API, and bioRxiv is not a source in search_papers.
- The bioRxiv API is reached only when OpenAlex, Crossref and Europe PMC all fail to resolve the DOI.
- No listing of recent preprints by category or date is exposed as a tool.
- The PDF link is returned, not the full text, and there is no citation count.
How ScholarMuse reaches bioRxiv / medRxiv
The connector calls api.biorxiv.org/details with the DOI, trying the bioRxiv server first and then medRxiv. No API key is sent.
DOI lookups are cached for up to 1 day, so a version posted today may not show until tomorrow.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: Each preprint carries its own licence (see `license` on the record)
Preprint metadata from the bioRxiv/medRxiv API (api.biorxiv.org), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Records that come from bioRxiv / medRxiv carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow bioRxiv / medRxiv's own citation guidance.
