Europe PMC is at the heart of open science. We partner with other organisations to build robust public tools to provide access to open content and data, and to advance life sciences research.
Europe PMC provides comprehensive access to life sciences literature from trusted sources. It's available to anyone, anywhere for free. With Europe PMC you can search and read 44 million publications, preprints and other documents enriched with links to supporting data, reviews, protocols, and other relevant resources.
Europe PMC is hosted by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), an international, innovative and interdisciplinary research organisation which aims to make the world’s public biological data freely available to the scientific community. Europe PMC is partnered with PubMed Central (PMC), and endorsed and supported by a group of international science funders as their repository of choice.
Europe PMC works closely with partner organisations to build open, full text scientific literature resources and support innovation by engaging users, enabling contributors, and integrating related research data.
Access a wealth of life sciences research, including preprints
Europe PMC contains 44 million abstracts and 9.7 million full text articles, including research articles, preprints, micropublications, books, reviews, and protocols. Europe PMC integrates content from a range of sources such as PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Agricola, and 32 life science preprint servers including biorxiv, Research Square, and Preprints.org. See Preprints in Europe PMC for more information about the integration of preprints, and the COVID-19 preprints full text initiative. When the full text is not available, Europe PMC can provide extended access to full text, with links to legal free copies via Unpaywall.
Connect research articles with other research resources
Research articles in Europe PMC are linked to data behind the paper, which supports reproducibility. Articles are also linked to protocols, smart citations, peer review materials and more. Preprints versions are linked to each other, and to the journal published version, when possible.
44 millionExamine data behind the paper
Europe PMC connects publications with high quality data in over 40 biological databases. This includes data that supports the results of the publication, so that you can examine the evidence behind scientific claims and for reproducibility of the results. Europe PMC also includes links to curated biological resources, where you can find out more about the data that cites the publication. Learn more about Data in Help using Europe PMC.
Use intuitive and powerful search tools
Based on the latest technologies Europe PMC search helps you discover research evidence even when it is buried deep in the literature.
Compared to other search engines, Europe PMC searches both abstracts and full text of over 44 million articles, allowing you to find a greater number of relevant results. Our high-performance search tools allow you to customize your queries, enabling you to search specific parameters such as cited articles; articles with open peer reviews or extended protocols; searches limited to clinical trials or preprints, or even to specific article sections, such as Methods or Figures. They help you search for data behind publications and find papers providing biological models, citing proteomics datasets, or describing protein structures. See Advanced search and Search syntax reference for more search options.
In addition, Europe PMC offers the Grant finder tool to enable searching for 105,162 biomedical grants from 35 life science funders, as well as 18,984 grants awarded for COVID-19 related projects.
Showcase your work
Europe PMC supports researchers with author profile pages that showcase and promote the author's scholarly work. The author profile provides a graphical overview of published articles and preprints, their open access status, as well as their citation rate over time. Author profiles are based on the author's ORCID record. An ORCID is a unique identifier for research authors. The use of ORCID in Europe PMC makes it possible to refine the author search, and receive suggested authors based on their ORCID record. You can also add articles to your ORCID profile using Europe PMC’s ORCID claiming tool.
Europe PMC operates a manuscript submission system (Europe PMC plus) on behalf of Europe PMC funders, who recommend or require publications from the research they fund to be made openly available via Europe PMC. Authors supported by Europe PMC funders can deposit their manuscripts for inclusion in Europe PMC and by extension in PubMed Central (PMC) using Europe PMC plus.
Find annotated biological concepts
Europe PMC uses text mining and machine learning techniques to annotate literature with relevant biological terms and concepts, from chemicals and cell lines, to gene mutations and protein interactions. You can find biological terms in the text by using the Annotations tool to select and find terms for highlighting. Over 1.3 billion annotations covering 42 types of concepts are available. Find out more about Annotations.
Get results with powerful programmatic tools
Europe PMC provides programmatic access to open content and metadata for building diverse literature-based applications. Europe PMC offers APIs for accessing publications and related information via the Articles API, grant information from Europe PMC funders and COVID-19 related grants via the Grants API, and text-mined annotations contained in abstracts and open access articles via the Annotations API. See Developer resources for a full list of services provided. To make it easier to programmatically search and retrieve specific research outputs, Europe PMC integrates persistent identifiers, such as ORCIDs, Grant DOIs and RORs.
If you would like to see examples of how Europe PMC APIs can be used to create new products and services, please visit API case studies.
Europe PMC strongly supports open source development. Open source projects of particular interest to the user community are available on Europe PMC GitLab and GitHub pages.
Take advantage of text-mining resources
For the text-mining community, a range of Europe PMC resources are available as bulk downloads via the FTP site:
To make text-mining advances widely available for the benefit of the research community Europe PMC has developed a dedicated Annotations Submission System. It allows expert text-mining providers to share their results on the Europe PMC website via the Annotations panel and programmatically through the Annotations API. The system can also accept relevant statements manually curated by dedicated biocuration groups.
Millions of researchers, curators and librarians use Europe PMC for their literature research. Here is why:
I do recommend Europe PMC to the researchers that I meet, because it gives you a better experience than some other search tools for the literature, and you get the full text with it, and it has a lot of added extras, linking out to resources that are relevant.Naomi Penfold, Associate Director, ASAPbio
To be able to search both the published literature and preprints with the same search terms and in one go that's the real advantage.Frank Uhlmann, Group Leader, Francis Crick Institute
Europe PMC APIs have been used by programmatic users from a host of external parties to do large scale literature analyses, and build diverse applications. These include academic institutes, commercial industries, publishers, funders, infrastructure providers, text mining groups, open science apps and tools, and Research Information (CRIS) systems. Here is why:
We use Europe PMC API in our citation harvesting pipeline. Europe PMC has a well documented, reliable, and production-ready API allowing any user and service to build an open ecosystem of tools that empowers researchers.Alex Loannidis, Service manager, Zenodo
I have worked with other literature services APIs like Scopus and WoS, but there is no comparison with the service Europe PMC team provides.Frederico Lopez Gomez, Web developer, International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium
Find out more about How people are using Europe PMC APIs.
Europe PMC will continue to focus development in these key areas:
To learn about Europe PMC’s mission and objectives, and to view plans for future development visit the Europe PMC Roadmap.
For detailed information about Europe PMC, read the article Europe PMC in 2020.
