PubMed Scraper

Bulk-scrape biomedical literature from PubMed — the U.S. National Library of Medicine's index of 35M+ articles. Get titles, full abstracts, authors, journals, publication dates, DOIs, PMC IDs, MeSH terms and keywords for every matching paper. Full PubMed query syntax, date filters, and thousands of results per run. Powered by the official NCBI E-utilities API. No account, no API key.

Features

• 🔎 Full PubMed query syntax — terms, fields ([Title], [Author], [MeSH]), booleans and date ranges
• 📄 Full abstracts — complete abstract text for every article that has one
• 👥 Authors — full author lists with a count per paper
• 🏷️ Rich metadata — journal, publication date, DOI, PMC ID, MeSH terms, keywords, article types
• 📅 Date filters — restrict by publication date
• 📊 Bulk & history-paginated — one query streams through tens of thousands of results
• ⚡ Official & reliable — built on NCBI E-utilities

What you get

One record per article:

{
  "pmid": "38512345",
  "title": "…",
  "journal": "Nature Medicine",
  "pubYear": 2024,
  "pubDate": "2024 Mar 15",
  "authors": ["Jane A Smith", "…"],
  "authorCount": 8,
  "doi": "10.1038/s41591-024-00000-0",
  "pmcId": "PMC10987654",
  "articleTypes": ["Journal Article"],
  "meshTerms": ["CRISPR-Cas Systems", "Gene Editing"],
  "keywords": ["…"],
  "url": "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38512345/",
  "abstract": "…"
}

Output schema

Input

{
  "query": "crispr gene editing",
  "dateFrom": "2020",
  "dateTo": "2025",
  "includeAbstract": true,
  "maxResults": 5000
}

Use cases

• Systematic & literature reviews — pull every paper on a topic, with abstracts, in one run
• Research monitoring — track new publications in your field by date
• Biomedical datasets — build corpora of titles + abstracts for analysis or AI
• Citation & metadata — collect DOIs, PMC IDs and MeSH terms at scale

Pricing

Pay-per-event: a small amount per article scraped. See the Pricing tab for current rates.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. This Actor runs on the official NCBI E-utilities API with no account required. You can optionally add an NCBI apiKey to raise the request rate for very large runs, but it's not needed for typical use.

How many articles can I scrape per run? Set maxResults as high as you need — a single query streams through PubMed's history server, so one broad query can return tens of thousands of articles in a run.

Is scraping PubMed legal? Yes. This Actor uses PubMed's official NCBI E-utilities API and follows its usage guidance (paced requests, an identified client). It returns openly available metadata as-is.

What format is the output? Structured JSON — one record per article — exportable as JSON, CSV or Excel. Each record includes PMID, title, full abstract, authors, journal, publication date, DOI, PMC ID, MeSH terms and keywords.

Can I filter by date or use PubMed field syntax? Yes. The query field accepts full PubMed syntax including fields like [Title], [Author] and [MeSH] plus booleans, and dateFrom/dateTo restrict results to a publication date range.

Can I integrate this with other tools? The PubMed Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app thanks to integrations on the Apify platform. It works with Make, Zapier, Slack, Airbyte, GitHub, Google Drive and many more, plus the Apify API, JavaScript/Python clients and MCP. Or use webhooks to trigger an action whenever a run finishes.

Building a biomedical literature dataset? These other hipersoft scrapers pair well with this one:

• Europe PMC Scraper — life-science papers with full-text links across PubMed, PMC and preprints
• ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper — bulk clinical trial records, sponsors and locations
• OpenAlex Scraper — 250M+ scholarly works with citations and abstracts
• Crossref Scraper — DOIs, citation counts and metadata from 150M+ works

Notes

Uses the official NCBI E-utilities API and follows its usage guidance (paced requests, identified client). Returns PubMed's openly-available metadata as-is. PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine; this is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NLM or NCBI.

You pay only for what the run returns. Set a maximum cost per run and it stops cleanly at that limit.