Search biomedical literature via the Europe PMC REST API
domain: www.ebi.ac.uk · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Send a GET request to https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search with a query parameter using Europe PMC's field-prefixed search syntax
Set format=json (default may be XML/Dublin Core) to receive JSON results
Choose a resultType (idlist, lite, or core) depending on whether only IDs, key metadata, or full metadata including abstract/MeSH terms is needed
Use pageSize and the cursorMark (or nextCursorMark from the response) to page through large result sets
Optionally set a sort parameter on a single-valued field with asc/desc order to control result ordering
For a known publication ID, use resultType=core in a targeted single-result query instead of a broad search
Known gotchas
Default sort is relevance-based, not chronological — explicit sort parameters are needed for date-ordered results
resultType=idlist/lite/core each return meaningfully different payload sizes; requesting 'core' for large result sets can produce very large responses
Cursor-based paging (cursorMark) should be used for deep pagination instead of simple page-number increments, which are unreliable past a certain depth
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