# PubMed

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/pubmed/  
**APIs profiled:** 10

NCBI PubMed is the primary biomedical literature database providing free access to over 35 million citations and abstracts from life science journals and online books. The Entrez Programming Utilities (E-utilities) REST API enables programmatic searching, retrieval, and linking of citations, article metadata, abstracts, full-text links, and MeSH terms across PubMed and 38 other NCBI databases.

## Kin Score — 32.1 / 100 (thin)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 32.1).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 74.1 |
| Contract Quality | 57.8 |
| Governance | 9.8 |
| Contract Governance | 9.8 |
| Operational Transparency | 0.0 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 14.3 |
| Commercial Clarity | 28.9 |
| Access Clarity | 28.9 |

Regulatory layer — **Health**: 21.3 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 32.1 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | partial |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Free · Self-serve signup — onboarding: self-serve, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (10)

- **PubMed Central OA API** — The PMC Open Access API provides citation data, license information, and download links for Open Access articles in PubMed Central. Supports filtering by date and license type, ...
- **PMC OAI-PMH API** — The PMC OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) API enables systematic harvesting of metadata for all PMC archive items and full text for licensed co...
- **PMC BioC API** — The BioC API provides full text retrieval of PubMed Central Open Access articles in BioC XML or JSON format, optimized for natural language processing (NLP) and text mining appl...
- **PMC ID Converter API** — The PMC ID Converter API translates between different article identifier formats including PubMed IDs (PMIDs), PubMed Central IDs (PMCIDs), Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), an...
- **PubMed History API** — Operations for managing sets of records on the Entrez History server
- **PubMed Info API** — Operations for retrieving database metadata and information
- **PubMed Links API** — Operations for finding linked records between databases
- **PubMed Retrieval API** — Operations for retrieving records from Entrez databases
- **PubMed Search API** — Operations for searching Entrez databases
- **PubMed Summary API** — Operations for retrieving document summaries

## Agentic access (1)

- **Pubmed Agentic Access** — 9 operations · 1 acting

## Security (2)

- **Pubmed Authentication** — apiKey · 1 scheme
- **Pubmed Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **Entrez Eutils**

## Tags

Biomedical, Life Science, Research, Literature, Citations, abstracts, Mesh, Genomics, PubMed, NCBI

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/pubmed/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.