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Web Service Overview
The Europe PMC RESTful Web Service gives you access to over 33 million publications from various sources, including PubMed, Agricola, the European Patents Office (EPO) and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE). Use the Web Service to access
Database cross-references to a number of databases, including UniProt, the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and more.
Reference lists for more than 12.5 million publications.
Citation counts and a citation network.
Text-mined terms from full text articles, including accession numbers, chemicals, diseases, genes and proteins, Gene Ontology terms, and organisms. Use the Annotations API to access annotations in abstracts and full text articles, with links to related database records.
Output response formats can be XML or JSON. In the case of the 'search' module a Dublin Core format is also available.
Web Service Releases
Two versions of the RESTful web service are simultaneously available. This approach to release management allows users to prepare for a new version,
rather than having to immediately respond to a version change. Join the Europe PMC web service users' Google group to receive notifications about web service releases.
Construct your URL for a fields request as follows for the production version:
By default, the Europe PMC RESTful search results are sorted by relevance, with the most relevant result being presented first in the list.
The search module additionally provides a sort parameter available for every single-valued field, e.g. P_PDATE_D, AUTH_FIRST, CITED. The sort parameter can be combined with'asc' or 'desc' sort order.
RESTful search results can be sorted in two other ways using the arguments: 'sort_date:y' and 'sort_cited:y' in the 'query' parameter of the search module. For example:
Sort by the number of citations, most cited being the first result presented:
This module must be used with the header Content-type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded. This means that all the parameters must be passed in the request body in the url encoded form. Construct your POST search requests as follows:
This module must be used with the header Content-type:application/json. This means that all the parameters must be passed in the request body as a JSON object. Find out more About the article status monitor, how updates are obtained and what’s included in the data. Construct your POST search requests as follows:
A note is made above in the Overview about the different versions of the web service available. Construct your URL for a fields request as follows for the production version:
Note that for this module, the user may specify either a slash symbol (/) or a question mark symbol (?) after the method name, and before the query.For example: profile?query=parameters or profile/query=parameters
Note that for this module, the user may specify either a slash symbol (/) or a question mark symbol (?) after the method name, and before the query. For example:search?query=parameters or search/query=parameters
Curl
Request URL
Response Body
Response Code
Response Headers
Format
The format can either be XML, JSON or DC (Dublin Core); the default value is XML if the parameter is unspecified. XML returns the same response as the SOAP web service; see the Web Service Reference Guide.
DC returns the following Dublin Core metadata fields, within an RDF/XML wrapper: dc:contributor, dc:creator, dc:date, dc:description, dc:identifier, dc:language,dc:subject, dc:title, dc:type, dcterms:abstract, dcterms:accessRights, dcterms:bibliographicCitation, dcterms:isPartOf, dcterms:isVersionOf.
The use of these fields complies with the DCMI Metadata Terms recommendation documentation. Additionally, it should be noted that dc:contributor fields are used for the organisations to which some, or all of the authors listed in the dc:creator fields are affiliated. dc:description contains the publication types of the record (e.g. "Journal Article", "Book", etc.) dcterms:accessRights is only included for works in the Open Access subset of the PMC collection. There are two dcterms:bibliographicCitation fields for each journal article record, one which matches the "Text (citation)" option in the export feature on the Europe PMC web site, the other a machine-readable format using the syntax of the OpenURL standard. Other publication types (e.g. books, patents) only contain a single, non-machine-readable dcterms:bibliographicCitation.
Publication dates have been mapped as follows: dc:date - first publication date (the date of first publication, whichever is first, electronic or print publication; where a date is not fully available e.g. year only, an algorithm is applied to determine the value), dc:terms:available - electronic publication date, dc:terms:created - print publication date.
Note that the ‘resulttype’ parameter associated with the DC response is always set to ‘core’.