PubMed / Europe PMC
PubMed is the biomedical citation database of the US National Library of Medicine. ScholarMuse does not call PubMed's own API. It queries Europe PMC, the literature service run by EMBL-EBI, which includes PubMed records together with PubMed Central and preprints. An agent can search it by keyword and look up a paper by PMID, PMCID or DOI.
ScholarMuse tools: search_papers, 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 PubMed / Europe PMC.
search_papers
Searched by default. The query runs over all of Europe PMC, so hits can include preprints and records that are not in PubMed.
- doi
- DOI in lower case
- pmid
- PubMed id
- pmcid
- PubMed Central id
- authors
- Author or group names, first 12
- year
- Publication year
- date
- First publication date
- venue
- Journal title
- type
- Publication type, or preprint
- citedBy
- Citation count in Europe PMC
- retracted
- True for type Retracted Publication
- openAccessUrl
- Open-access or publicly readable full-text link, PDF preferred
- abstract
- Abstract text, cut at 2,000 characters
get_paper
A PMCID goes straight to Europe PMC. A PMID or DOI is tried on OpenAlex first, so Europe PMC answers only when OpenAlex has no record.
- doi
- DOI in lower case
- pmid
- PubMed id
- pmcid
- PubMed Central id
- authors
- Author or group names, first 12
- year
- Publication year
- venue
- Journal title
- volume
- Volume
- issue
- Issue
- pages
- Page information
- citedBy
- Citation count in Europe PMC
- openAccess
- True when open access or publicly readable full text exists
- abstract
- Abstract text, cut at 2,000 characters
What it covers
- Biomedical and life-science literature as indexed by Europe PMC: PubMed records, PubMed Central articles and preprints.
- Search can be limited by publication year range and to open-access records.
- Lookups accept a PMID, a PMCID or a DOI.
Limits
- At most 25 results per search_papers call, shared across all sources searched.
- A PMID must be written as pmid:12345 or as a pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov URL. A bare number is rejected.
- MeSH terms, affiliations, grant data and full text are not returned. Only the fields listed above are.
- verify_references does not query Europe PMC. A PMID in a reference is resolved through OpenAlex.
How ScholarMuse reaches PubMed / Europe PMC
The connector calls the Europe PMC search web service at ebi.ac.uk, not NCBI E-utilities. No API key is sent. A PMID lookup asks for that id within Europe PMC's PubMed (MED) records.
Searches are cached for up to 6 hours and single-record lookups for up to 1 day. Records also reach Europe PMC some time after they appear in PubMed.
API key: none to set up; the data comes through Europe PMC REST API.
Licence and attribution
Licence: Bibliographic metadata free to reuse; abstracts and full text stay under publisher or author copyright
Data from Europe PMC (europepmc.org), which includes PubMed (US National Library of Medicine).
Records that come from PubMed / Europe PMC carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow PubMed / Europe PMC's own citation guidance.
