science-articles

PubMed / PMC (NCBI E-utilities)

The US National Institutes of Health's index of biomedical literature, covering roughly 37 million citations plus about 10 million full-text articles in PubMed Central. You search the corpus through NCBI's E-utilities, which return results without an API key. It is the standard first stop for medical, clinical, and life-sciences literature.

Academic papers API

Search this archive

Why it’s useful & how it works

PubMed is the authoritative index of biomedical and life-sciences literature maintained by the US National Library of Medicine, and the standard starting point for medical and clinical research. You can search it by keyword, author, journal, MeSH term, or PubMed ID; papers indexed here link through to free full text in PubMed Central when available. Echo queries the NCBI E-utilities API on your behalf, returning the same results you would get searching pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov directly.

What’s inside

Over 40 million citations from MEDLINE, life-science journals, and online books. PubMed Central holds more than 11 million linked full-text articles, most with a matching PubMed record.

API access

https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=pubmed&term=...&retmode=json

What we measured

Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.

Reachability

Direct request: Responded HTTP 200 756 ms
Through a datacenter proxy: Unreachable 298 ms (fetch failed: Request was cancelled.)
API, direct: Responded HTTP 200 354 ms
API, through a proxy: Unreachable 239 ms (fetch failed: Request was cancelled.)

Did a real search return anything?

Returned results · 10 results for the sample query · median 883 ms · stable across runs

Benchmark coverage

Found 7 of 9 test items (78%) in the Academic papers cluster. Median response 363 ms.

By how well known the item is: 3/3 well-known, 3/4 mid, 1/2 obscure .

Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Search checked 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.