PubMed Has a Free API — Search 35M+ Medical Papers Without Scraping (No Key)

If you need biomedical research data, stop scraping Google Scholar. PubMed's E-utilities API gives you direct access to 35 million medical papers — completely free, no API key required. I discovered this API while building research paper scrapers, and it blew my mind how much data is available for free. Why PubMed API? 35M+ papers — the largest biomedical literature database No API key — just add your email as a courtesy (not required) No rate limits — 3 requests/second without key, 10/sec with free key Structured XML/JSON — clean, parseable output Full abstracts — complete text, not just titles Search papers in 10 lines import requests import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET # Step 1: Search for paper IDs query = "COVID-19 vaccine efficacy 2024" search_url = f"https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=pubmed&term={query}&retmax=5&retmode=json" search = requests.get(search_url).json() ids = search["esearchresult"]["idlist"] print(f"Found {search['esearchresul