Europe PMC RESTful Web Service

Use in your agent

Search Europe PMC literature via the REST API. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 6, 2026.

Access

• No key needed for the REST search endpoint at ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest.
• europepmc.org itself returned HTTP 403 to a plain curl request but HTTP 200 in a browser; query the REST API host directly.

Request

curl 'https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search?query=maritime&format=json'

Format

JSON with top-level version and hitCount fields (hitCount 48,304 for a 2026-11-05 query of "maritime", version 6.9) plus a resultList.result array of matching records.

Load into pandas and Parquet

Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.

"""Europe PMC REST search -> pandas -> Parquet. No key needed."""
import requests
import pandas as pd

URL = "https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search"
params = {"query": "maritime", "format": "json", "pageSize": 100}
r = requests.get(URL, params=params, timeout=60)
r.raise_for_status()
data = r.json()
results = data.get("resultList", {}).get("result", [])
df = pd.json_normalize(results)
df.to_parquet("europepmc_maritime.parquet", index=False)
print(data.get("hitCount"), "total hits; saved", len(df), "records (API version", data.get("version"), ")")

Run by us on 2026-11-05 (python 3 | pandas | pyarrow | requests). Result: Europe PMC REST search for "maritime" returned HTTP 200 without a key on 2026-11-06: hitCount 48,304, API version 6.9 (JSON fields version and hitCount).

Limits

• Not stated numeric rate limit on the checked pages.

Quirks

• Distinct from the already-listed NCBI E-utilities (PubMed): adds a European full-text OA subset, text-mined annotations, citations and grants.
• Query the ebi.ac.uk REST host directly rather than europepmc.org if a plain HTTP client gets blocked (403).

Terms and attribution

• EMBL-EBI Terms of Use (revised 14 Oct 2026): "promotes open science through its mission to provide freely available Data Resources and Tools."
• "Where EMBL-EBI presents scientific data generated by others, EMBL-EBI imposes no additional restriction on the use of the contributed data than those provided by the data owner, unless otherwise specified in these Terms of Use."
• "EMBL-EBI expects attribution (e.g. in publications, services or products) for the use of any of its Data Resources and Tools in accordance with good scientific practice."
• Article full texts carry their own publishers'/authors' licences, which vary by article. Search is free to query subject to Provider/upstream terms; do not treat returned metadata as an affirmative open-data licence.

Sources

• https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search?query=maritime&format=json: “"version": "6.9", "hitCount": 48304”
• https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/terms-of-use: “Where EMBL-EBI presents scientific data generated by others, EMBL-EBI imposes no additional restriction on the use of the contributed data than those provided by the data owner, unless otherwise specified in these Terms of Use.”
• https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/terms-of-use: “EMBL-EBI expects attribution (e.g. in publications, services or products) for the use of any of its Data Resources and Tools in accordance with good scientific practice.”