Developer Resources
We hope that developers make use of the APIs and tools that we have built for PMC.
In this page, we list the APIs and public code repositories related to PMC. We also present some of the most common developer questions, and provide instructions and examples for addressing them in subsequent pages.
PMC APIs
The use of our APIs is entirely free, and doesn't require an API key, but we ask that you please:
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Do not make concurrent requests, even at off-peak times; and
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Include two parameters that help to identify your service or application to our servers:
- tool should be the name of the application, as a string value with no internal spaces, and
- email should be the e-mail address of the maintainer of the tool, and should be a valid e-mail address.
For the sake of readability, these parameters have been omitted from the on-screen display of the URLs in the example pages.
Here is a list of APIs that can be used to get data about PMC resources.
- NCBI E-utilities,
- File validation tools,
- OA web service,
- OAI-PMH,
- ID converter,
- FTP service,
- Literature Citation Exporter.
Related Resource: Science.gov
To improve the discoverability of publications across federal agency repositories, Science.gov compiled an Inventory of Agency APIs and Other Services for Public Access Collections that may be of additional interest.
PMC public code repositories
PMC maintains some of our software on GitHub, within the NCBI organization. The following is the list of GitHub code repositories related to PMC. See the README files within each, for more information.
Developer help
The following pages address the most common problems that developers face (as determined by the queries that we've received to our help desk).
How do I ...
- ... retrieve PMC article identifiers (PMCIDs) from a search?
- ... get article metadata?
- ... find articles that cite a given article, or that a given article cites?
- ... find records in other NCBI databases referenced by PMC articles?
- ... cross-reference article identifiers?
- ... do text mining / retrieving full text?
- ... maintain a local copy of the OA subset?
- ... find articles by license?
See also
For more information, you should also consult: