How to use the search

The main Europe PMC site provides two search functions: a free text search, direct from the main search box, and an Advanced search which provides you with a number of different options.

You can refine your search by entering search syntax in the search box. The search syntax reference includes many examples.

If you misspell a query term, for example 'luekemia' rather than 'leukemia', a "did you mean" suggestion for your search is provided.

Topic search

To search for a topic, enter your search terms directly into the main search box. Consider using an exact match search to narrow your results. You can also search within specific sections of the article using the Advanced search. Use search filters on the search results page to narrow your search.

Find a specific article

Title search

If an exact title is known, and it is fairly distinct, try placing the full title in quotation marks to find exact matches:

"Leukotriene E4 activates human Th2 cells for exaggerated proinflammatory cytokine production in response to prostaglandin D2"

If only one article is found, the search will go directly to the article page.

You can also use the Advanced search to search only within the title field.

Author or ORCID search

In the main search box you can search for works by authors as follows:

• First name and last name, for example: 'John Smith'
• Last name and first name, for example: 'Smith John'
• Last name and initials, for example: 'Smith J', or 'Smith JJ'
• Initials and last name, for example 'J Smith'

When you enter an author name in the main search box a matching process restricts your search to the author metadata field using the 'AUTH' search syntax. Up to two suggested authors, who have a matching surname and initial or first name, may be shown at the top of the search results, as shown below. Suggested authors have linked their articles in Europe PMC to their ORCID iD. The two authors with the most publications are shown. You can restrict your search to a suggested author's publications using the link from the author name, which will search Europe PMC using their ORCID iD e.g. AUTHORID:"0000-0002-6982-4660".

The author search field on the Advanced search page suggests author name matches as you type. If an author has an ORCID iD the auto-suggest will also display it as shown below:

The list of names presented is ordered by the number of articles an author has published. Alternatively you can just enter an ORCID into the author field, and the author will be found if he/she has a linked article contained in Europe PMC. For example:

An author's ORCID iD can also be typed directly into the quick search box, as opposed to using an author's name:

DOI, PMID or PMCID search

To search by DOI (Digital Object Identifier) you can enter the DOI into the search box and this will usually find a result. To be more specific use the search syntax 'DOI:', for example:
DOI:10.1007/bf00197367

Enter the PMID (PubMed ID, identifier for an abstract record) number into the search box and this will usually find a result. Alternatively use the search syntax 'EXT_ID:'. PMCIDs (PubMed Central IDs, identifiers for full text articles) can be entered into the search box, for example:
PMC3013671

For a more specific search use the prefix PMCID, for example:
PMCID:PMC3013671

PMIDs are unique when used in conjunction with a data source. When searching for a PMID that yields more than one result, the data source can be specified to find the exact match, for example the following search returns three results:
EXT_ID:526631

Specifying the data source using the 'SRC:' search term, along with the PMID will find a unique result, for example:
EXT_ID:526631 AND SRC:MED

Journal search

When searching for a journal using its full name from the free text quick search box, the 'JOURNAL:' search syntax can be used, for example: JOURNAL:"Advances in Pharmacological Sciences" to make the search more accurate.

You can access the Journal List from 'Tools' in the navigation bar. The list features titles that deposit full text content to Europe PMC and can also be used as a quick way of searching the contents of a particular journal. For bibliographic information about a Europe PMC journal, click on the ISSN alongside the title in the Journal List.

You can search for journal titles directly from the Advanced search page by typing into the journal field – the autocomplete function will suggest likely matches that you can choose from.

Data citations or links search

Data citations are mentions of accession numbers (unique identifiers for data) in the text of articles. Data citations are available for data in a number of different databases including: European Nucleotide Archive, UniProt, PDBe, OMIM, RefSNP, RefSeq, Pfam, InterPro, and Ensembl. Data links are citations of an article by a database record. Data links from a specific data record to a Europe PMC article are provided by a number of life science databases. The databases included are listed in sections 2.7 and 2.8 of the Search syntax reference. The screenshot below shows the relevant section on the Advanced search form:

You can also select any combination of links and citations using the Boolean operators available on the form.

Supporting data is linked from the article page.

You can also find papers that cite data DOIs. For programmatic users, all searches can also be used in either the SOAP or RESTful Web Services.

Grant number or agency search

Search for articles resulting from projects supported by specific funders, or individual grants, on the Advanced search page using the Funder or Grant ID fields—both of which are auto-suggest fields, under Funding Attribution:

Alternatively use search syntax in the main search box. For articles related to a specific grant, you should use 'GRANT_ID:' followed by the number which you are interested in, for example:
GRANT_AGENCY:"Wellcome Trust" GRANT_ID:"069683"

The grant finder tool enables you to find grant information for grants from Europe PMC funders.

Sort search results

Europe PMC results can be sorted as follows:

1. By relevance
2. By publication date
3. By date received
4. By times cited

The sort options appear above the search results list, in a dropdown labeled "sort by" (see below). The sort applied to the search results list is highlighted, and defaults to 'Relevance'.

If you want to see which articles are new in Europe PMC since your last search, sort by 'Date received'. This is the date when the article first appeared in Europe PMC. Whereas 'Date published' is the date the article was first published in a journal.

The 'Times Cited (most)' sort shows the most highly cited articles, listed in descending order. The citation counts per paper in Europe PMC might differ from the counts displayed in Scopus or Web of Science, because Europe PMC does not have access to the same content as these resources. However, highly cited articles in Europe PMC correlate with highly cited papers on other platforms, and the information on where papers are being cited is freely available. Find out more about the Europe PMC citation network.

How relevance is calculated

Europe PMC displays the most relevant results for the search executed, according to document scoring and weighting. The document with the highest score is displayed first, followed by second and third highest scoring documents and so on.

The score each document receives for any given search is based on a number of factors including:

• The frequency with which a term appears in a document. Given a search query, the higher the term frequency, the higher the document's score.
• The rarer a term is across all documents in the index, the higher its contribution to the score.
• The more query terms that are found in a document, the higher its score.
• The more words that a field (e.g. title field, or text body field) contains, the lower its score. This factor penalizes documents with longer field values.
• Documents with more recent dates are given a slightly higher score.

Filter search results

Free full text access

You can filter your search to find free full text, either displayed within Europe PMC, or linked to a free and legal source.

• Full text in Europe PMC: All articles that are freely available to read within Europe PMC can be found with this filter. The full text of these articles is indexed, and can be searched using the Main search bar.
• Link to free full text: All articles with a known link to a free and legal copy of the full text, but that are not available to read within Europe PMC, can be found with this filter.

To filter for open access license types, see Advanced search.

Type

Filter your search to show only articles of the following content types, as shown in the example below:

• Research articles: articles presenting the results of experimental research.
• Reviews: reviews on a topic covering a broad set of previously published articles.
• Preprints: research articles that have not yet undergone formal peer-review and have been submitted to public preprint servers.
  • Journal published: Filter for preprints that have been published in a journal.
  • Reviewed: Filter for preprints that have been reviewed or evaluated by peers.

To find only preprints that have either been published in a journal or reviewed by peers, select both filters.

Publication date

Searches can be filtered by publication date, either by clicking on the year of publication, or entering a custom date range. This filter uses the date of first publication, or FIRST_PDATE using search syntax.

Find the full text of an article

If the full text for an article is available on Europe PMC, the label 'Free to read' or "Free to read & use" is shown in the search result. Clicking this label links straight to the full text of the article in Europe PMC. This is highlighted in the in the screenshot below:

On the article page, if the free full text section is available on Europe PMC, a link is provided in the left menu.

If a free, legal copy of the full text is found on an external website by Unpaywall, a link is shown with the Unpaywall logo.

If the full text is only available at the publisher or another external website, an external link icon is shown as below.

How to cite an article

To export a single record

1. Go to the article page of the record.
2. Follow the 'Get citation' link.
3. From the popup window you can:
   • Add the citation to your export list.
   • Copy the citation text to your computer's clipboard, to paste into another document.
   • Email the citation to yourself or someone else.
   • Export the individual citation - select your desired format, then 'Download'.

An article citation typically includes the article title, author list, journal, publication date, DOI, PMID, PMCID. Article citations can be downloaded in several different formats. Some citation export formats include additional metadata about the article. Full text is also available in XML format, but only for articles in the Europe PMC open access subset.

To export a selection of records from a search

• Use the 'add to export list' link at the bottom of each record in the results which you wish to export. You can run multiple searches, adding different records from each to your export list.
• Follow the 'Export citations' link on the search results page. From here you can review your export list and remove individual citations if you wish.
• Select your desired file format. The 'BibTeX' and 'RIS' formats can be imported into many popular citation manager programs such as Mendeley, EndNote, RefWorks, CiteULike, Papers etc.
• Use the 'Download' button.

Save search & create alert

On the search results page, use the "Save & create alert" button located to the right of the main search box, to save your current search query and create an email alert. You'll then receive regular email updates of new results for the query, and you can unsubscribe, or edit the search query or email frequency anytime.

Sign in options

You will need to sign in to save an alert. You have the option to sign in with external services including ORCID, Twitter, or Europe PMC plus. Or you can sign in with, or create a Europe PMC account using your email address.

Save the query and create an alert

Clicking the Save & create alert button after sign-in opens a form that allows you to edit, name and save the query, and select frequency settings for an email alert.

Edit query and test results

You can edit the search terms within the form. You will then be able to click "Test results" to see the number of results, or "View results in new window to test" to see all search results from the edited search terms within a new window.

Choose whether and when to receive email updates

If you do not wish to receive email updates for new results, select "No".

If you wish to receive email updates for new results, select a frequency, and in some cases a preferred day. Alerts are emailed at approximately 06:00 GMT on the day specified.

Add or edit your alerts email

If you've logged into Europe PMC using an external service such as ORCID, Twitter, or Europe PMC plus for the first time, you will be asked to add an email address for receiving alerts (Your email address is not shared with Europe PMC by external services.) An email will be sent to the email address entered, and you will need to verify it before receiving alerts.

If an email address is already associated with your account, you have the option to add a different one, just for receiving alerts. After editing, an email will be sent to the account and will need to be verified before you will receive alerts at the new email address.

Select the content you'd like to receive

When you receive an email with updates, the title, author, and journal for any new results will be displayed. You can also choose to receive a partial abstract, which will display the first few lines of the abstract within the email.

Save the alert

Once you save the alert, you will be taken to the Saved alerts page, which can also be accessed from the account menu, in the top-right corner of the website. From this page you can view, edit, delete, or create new alerts. You can also change the email address for receiving alerts.

Exact match searches

Use quotation marks to retrieve publications containing your exact search phrase. For example, "Small cell lung cancer" retrieves fewer results than small cell lung cancer because the search in quotation marks looks for documents containing the exact phrase. The search without quotation marks finds documents containing all of the words small AND cell AND lung AND cancer, but the words may appear anywhere in the text of the document and are not necessarily in close proximity.

Boolean operators

Use the Advanced search form to facilitate searching, or manually enter search terms in the main search box. A Boolean operator is a logical connection; a word that is used to connect two or more search terms. Note that AND is the default operator where multiple search terms are used. You can use the AND, OR and NOT operators to control search results, for example:

Wildcard operators

The wildcard asterisk character (*) can be used to facilitate searching. You can also use this operator to search for any word that starts with a base word, for example to search for any word that starts with "neuron":
neuron*

This will search for neuron, neurone, neuronal etc.

Advanced search form

The Advanced search form provides a number of optional parameters, which help to create precise search queries without the need to remember search syntax.

As a query is built, a 'query builder' box at the top of the form displays the search syntax used by Europe PMC. This syntax can be edited and copied. The query syntax can be pasted into the main Europe PMC search box. The journal name, author, funder and grant ID fields provide auto-suggest functionality in a drop-down menu to help you complete the fields. The journal name suggestions (as shown below) are ordered by the number of articles published.

If you know of a journal which publishes articles on a particular topic, you can search for content from journals directly from the main search box using acronyms or abbreviations. Europe PMC currently handles six commonly used acronyms and abbreviations:

• EMBOJ for The EMBO journal.
• JAMA for Journal of the American Medical Association.
• JBC for The Journal of Biological Chemistry.
• NEJM for The New England Journal of Medicine.
• PNAS for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
• NAR for Nucleic Acids Research.

Europe PMC will consider adding other acronyms to the list if a request is sent to the Helpdesk.

Many of the search fields support the selection of multiple values by using the grey '+' button beside the field. These can be combined together with AND, OR and NOT operators.

Search within article metadata

If you wanted to find an article published in 2004, related to mouse research and knew one author was XJ Chen, you can use the Advanced Search to select the publication year 2004, and search using the 'TITLE' field for "mouse".
TITLE:"mouse" AND "Chen XJ" AND PUB_YEAR:2004

Search within an article section

You can search the following sections of articles: Abbreviations, Acknowledgements & Funding, Appendix, Author Contribution, Case Study, Competing Interest, Conclusion, Discussion, Figures, Introduction and Background, Keywords, Materials and Methods, Others, References, Results, Supplementary Information and Tables.

In the 'Filters' section of the Advanced search form, select the 'Article Sections' drop down, where you can select one or more sections as required. The text-box to the right of the section allows for free-text input. In the example below the user has chosen to look for the term 'mRNA' in the 'Discussion' sections of articles, but only where the same term does not appear in the 'Introduction and Background' sections of articles.

When building a search as in the example above, the following search query is generated:
(DISCUSS:"mRNA" NOT INTRO:"mRNA")

To enable section searching Europe PMC full text content has been indexed at the section-level, where the sections can be identified. The ability to identify the sections depends on the structure of the articles provided, and this can vary. Depending on the section, the coverage from the open access subset of Europe PMC, for example, varies from 1% to 80%.

MeSH terms and synonyms

MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) terms are assigned to most PubMed records, not Europe PMC full text.

An option is provided on the Advanced search form that will include/exclude synonyms based on the MeSH vocabulary from a search as shown below:

For example, a search for 'cat' will also include 'felis domestica' if synonyms are turned on. Synonym query expansion is off by default.

Search syntax

Search syntax can help to narrow your search to specific fields or metadata. For example, to restrict your search to article titles only, you could enter:
TITLE:"Leukotriene E4 Th2".

View the Search syntax reference for a guide to the search syntax available.

The Advanced search page provides many options to make your search more specific, without the need to recall search syntax.

Types of content

The content scope of Europe PMC covers both abstracts and full text articles. Some full text articles are available as open access content that can be downloaded and reused from the Europe PMC open access subset. Find out more about the sources of content and how content is added to Europe PMC.

Differences between abstracts and full text articles

An abstract is a brief summary of a research article. You can view the abstract of an article in Europe PMC by following on a search result.

If available, the full text of an article is available from the 'free to read' label in the search results, or by following the full text link in the left menu of the article page.

If the article is under a publisher's embargo, the date when the full text is due to be released by the publisher (the embargo date) is shown on the article page.

Not all articles in Europe PMC include the full text. Journals that deposit their articles in PMC, whose content is mirrored in Europe PMC, fall into one of three categories:

• For several hundred journals, Europe PMC has the complete contents of each issue, starting with the first issue. For the older journals in this group, the back issues of a journal (generally anything prior to the late 1990s) are available as digitized (scanned) copies of the original print journal.
• For a smaller group of journals, Europe PMC has complete issues and volumes for recent years, but not for all the early years of the journal.
• For other journals, Europe PMC does not contain any complete issues, just a selection of articles, e.g. those that the journal has published as open access articles.

In all three categories, Europe PMC has a journal's final published version of the respective articles. In addition to the final versions of articles provided by publishers, Europe PMC contains author manuscripts of selected articles from several thousand other journals.

Preprints

Since 2018, Europe PMC has indexed 772,386 preprints, and versions when available, to make them searchable alongside journal published articles. Similar to other articles in Europe PMC, preprints are linked to data behind the paper, can be claimed to an ORCID, included in citation networks, and linked to platforms that comment on or peer review preprints.

A preprint is a complete scientific manuscript that an author uploads on a public server for free viewing. Initially it is posted without peer review, but may acquire feedback or reviews as a preprint, and may eventually be published in a certified peer-reviewed journal.

For more information about the inclusion of preprints in Europe PMC, and the COVID-19 preprints initiative, see Preprints in Europe PMC.

Differences between PubMed, PMC and Europe PMC

Overall, Europe PMC contains more records than both PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC). In brief, Europe PMC contains all of the PubMed abstracts, the vast majority of PMC content, plus additional content including preprints, microPublications, patents, NHS clinical guidelines and Agricola records.

Full text publisher-provided content in PMC is subject to PMC Participation Agreements. Since July 2006, when Europe PMC (then branded as UKPMC) became the first PMC International centre, all PMC Participation Agreements have included permission to make a participating journal's content available at Europe PMC. Of those whose Participation Agreement pre-dates this, most agreed to this wider distribution of content, however some did not which means that approximately 250,000 articles in PMC are not available from Europe PMC; the vast majority of these are back issue articles.

Author manuscripts

Europe PMC Funders' Group organisations mandate that published research, arising from the research grants they award, must be made available through Europe PMC. One way this can be achieved is for authors to submit to Europe PMC (via Europe PMC plus) the final, peer reviewed manuscripts of such articles once they have been accepted for publication (also known as the author's accepted manuscript). Papers submitted to Europe PMC are made accessible through both Europe PMC and PMC.

Some funders, most notably Wellcome, prefer the final, published version of the article to be archived in Europe PMC and have made additional funding available to cover the costs related to open access (OA) article processing charges. In such cases, the publisher - as part of the OA fee - will take responsibility for uploading the final, published version of the article into PMC/Europe PMC. However, where publishers do not offer an OA option, then authors are required to self-archive author manuscripts in Europe PMC.

Differences between author manuscripts and journal articles

Most articles on Europe PMC are provided by the publisher and appear as they would on the publisher site. A small proportion of articles enter Europe PMC as author manuscripts; in this case the article content is what has been accepted by the journal for publication but it appears without the journal's house style.

When an author submits an article to a journal, it is reviewed by one or more independent peer reviewers and the journal's editors, who decide whether to accept it for publication. As part of this process, the author may be asked to revise the article to meet the journal's standards for acceptance. The final accepted manuscript submitted to Europe PMC (the author manuscript) is the version that the journal accepted for publication, including any revisions that the author made during the peer review process.

The published version of the article usually includes additional changes made by the journal's editorial staff after acceptance of the author's final manuscript. These edits may be limited to matters of style and format or they could include more substantive changes made with the concurrence of the author.

When Europe PMC displays the author manuscript version of an article, the source data preceding the article title includes a reference to the published article, as shown below.

Journals

The Europe PMC Journal List includes journals which deposit content in Europe PMC. Content from a wide range of other journals is also included in Europe PMC from other sources. Use the journal field in the Advanced Search to search for specific journal names.

Non-English articles

Almost all the material in Europe PMC is in English. A few journals in Europe PMC publish material in more than one language. For instance, the Canadian Medical Association Journal has some articles in (both) French and English. In this case, only the English material appears in Europe PMC's primary presentation of an article – the html full-text display. However, the journal's PDF version of the article may contain material in French as well as English. Another example is the Canadian Family Physician journal, which contains some articles that are available only in French; in this case Europe PMC provides this in both the full-text display and the journal's PDF version.

On the Advanced search page there is an option to filter your search by language. In this instance, the languages listed refer to the original language of the article. Abstracts are converted into English once submitted to PubMed.

Copyright restrictions on the use of material

Although access to the material in Europe PMC is free, the use of the material is still subject to the copyright and/or related license terms of the respective authors or publishers. See the Europe PMC Copyright Notice for more information.

You may not use any kind of automated process to download articles in bulk from the main Europe PMC site. Europe PMC will block the access of any user who is found to be violating this policy. Batch downloading of content in Europe PMC is supported by various methods including an FTP site, the Europe PMC-OAI service, and RESTful and SOAP web services – the content available via each method is summarised on the Developers page.

See the Europe PMC Open Access Subset page for more information.

ORCIDs

Europe PMC has integrated ORCIDs iDs—unique identifiers for authors, available from ORCID—into its website, search systems, and web services via the ORCID-based Article claiming tool (also see Link articles to your ORCID). This is useful for authors who want to display their publications list unambiguously on the Europe PMC website, allowing them to show for each article citation counts, linked data sets, and full text availability in Europe PMC. Millions of Europe PMC articles have been linked to hundreds of thousands of ORCID iDs, a count that grows significantly with each update from the ORCID foundation.

ORCID iDs are now shown in two ways on articles:

1. In the article author list under the article title.
2. As a list of ORCID iDs in the author information section of an article.

See, for example, the article that describes the initial sequence of the human genome.

If you search for an author using last name and first name or initial, up to two suggested authors are shown above your search results if authors with matching names and an ORCID iD are found.

ORCID iDs are also used to create the author profile pages in Europe PMC. For example, Alex Bateman's author profile.

Benefits for readers

ORCID-based author searching is particularly useful to find people who have common last names, or have changed their name, or contributed as part of a consortium.

Benefits for authors

Articles which have been claimed to ORCID (e.g. using Europe PMC's article claiming tool) and are publicly available will have an ORCID iD icon by the author's name. Opening the tooltip by hovering or tapping on the author name shows the author's affiliation details which helps to uniquely identify the author. The article will also appear in the author's profile page.

Citations & Impact

From the article page, you can use the Citations & Impact tab to see a summary of:

• Articles citing this article
• Database records citing this article
• Recommendations of this article

You will see up to 5 articles which cite the original article, with a link to view all citing articles.

About the Europe PMC citations network

To show citation counts for individual articles in Europe PMC requires that reference lists for as many relevant articles as possible are known, and that the citations within those reference lists can be identified uniquely, for example, by resolving to a PubMed ID. The number of "Cited By" articles listed for any individual article depends not only on the scientific importance of the article, but also on the size and scope of the dataset from which the citations have been extracted.

Why are Europe PMC citation counts different to Google Scholar, Web of Science or Scopus?

The citation dataset available to Europe PMC is based on open citation data and is smaller than those held by subscription-based services such as Web of Science or Scopus. Google Scholar also include citations in content other than peer reviewed articles. Therefore, the number of citing articles that Europe PMC shows for any given article is likely to be comparatively smaller than the number you would see using these services.

Why is the citation information for some articles incomplete?

Occasionally references in the source article are missing because there is insufficient information or formatting for them to be displayed on Europe PMC.

Sources of content in Europe PMC

Links to content providers are given in the following list:

How content is added to Europe PMC

Journals and books

Europe PMC mirrors the journal and book content in PubMed and PMC, with the exception of a few disabled journals, whose publishers did not give permission before the 2006 PMC Participation Agreements were in place. The process of adding journals is managed by the NCBI. A guide and FAQ is provided to explain the process of adding journals for publishers, and also to take them through an application. There is also guidance for publishers that would like to add books to the Europe PMC Bookshelf.

Preprints

The metadata and abstracts of preprints are added to Europe PMC from the Crossref metadata service typically within 24 hours of the preprint being published.

Europe PMC indexes preprints from the following preprint servers:

• Access Microbiology
• AfricArXiv
• agriRxiv
• AIJR Preprints
• ARPHA Preprints
• arXiv
• Authorea Preprints
• Beilstein Archives
• BioHackrXiv
• bioRxiv
• ChemRxiv
• EcoEvoRxiv
• Emerald Open Research
• F1000 Research
• Gates Open Research
• Health Open Research
• HRB Open Research
• MedEdPublish
• medRxiv
• NIHR Open Research
• Open Research Africa
• Open Research Europe
• PaleorXiv
• PeerJ Preprints
• Preprints.org
• PsyArXiv
• Qeios
• Research Square
• SciELO Preprints
• ScienceOpen Preprints
• SSRN
• Wellcome Open Research

Author manuscripts

Authors funded by Europe PMC funders submit manuscripts to Europe PMC if the published version is not available.

Grant data

Grant award data is currently sent to the Europe PMC Helpdesk where it is first loaded into GRIST (GRant Information SysTem), and then into Europe PMC plus. Grant data is publicly available (with the exception of email addresses) via the grant finder and the GRIST API. Grant-article associations are processed into Europe PMC in the following ways:

Patents

Patents in Europe PMC were provided by the European Patent Office.

ORCIDs

ORCID-article associations are provided in one of two ways:

• Authors link articles in Europe PMC to their ORCID record.
• Europe PMC receives ORCID-article associations from ORCID.org. Articles may have been linked to an ORCID by an author via another source, or automatically by a publisher.

Annotations

Annotations on abstracts and full text articles in Europe PMC are provided by EMBl-EBI and other text mining groups. See the Annotations API page for a list of annotation types and providers.

Citations

Citations in Europe PMC are based on open citation data from PubMed Central and CrossRef. See more about the Europe PMC citation network.

Europe PMC links articles to supporting data and resources, including supporting and related data, reviews, protocols and lay summaries. Find out more about linked data and resources below.

Figures

On some articles with full text in Europe PMC, a figure preview is available underneath the abstract, which allows you to jump to see the figure in the full text in context. Figures can only be shown under the abstract if the article has a license that allows reuse and modification of the article (read more about Open Access).

For all full text articles the figures they will appear in the full text section of the article, in context.

Data

If supporting data behind the paper is available, including supplementary materials and text-mined citations of data accessions, a link to the biological study in BioStudies can be found in the Data section.

Europe PMC text mines full text articles and abstracts for biological entities and concepts. Several types of terms are text-mined, including gene symbols, diseases, chemicals, organisms, Gene Ontology terms, and accession numbers. Text-mined terms can be browsed in the Data section. Protein Data Bank (PDBe), and some chemical structures can be viewed in this section. Where this is the case a 'View Structure' link will appear along with the data link.

Accession numbers represent specific data citations, similar to article citations within an article.

When database records are submitted or curated, references to the literature are frequently added, and made available in the Data section. You can link from the article to the original database record which cites the article. For example in the screenshot below there are 65 different UniProt records that cite one article. Other databases that provide cross-links in this way include ENA, InterPro, PDB, IntAct, ChEMBL, ChEBI and ArrayExpress.

Reviews & evaluations

Notification of Reviews & evaluations

If there are reviews or evaluations available for a preprint, the notification near the top of the page will provide a link to the Reviews & evaluations section.

If there are no reviews or evaluations available for the current preprint version, but they are available for another version, then the notification will suggest looking at Version history to link to reviews on another version.

The Reviews & evaluations section

You can find links to reviews, recommendations, and commentary from expert sources in the Reviews & evaluations section of the article page. These are sourced from a variety of different community groups, peer review platforms and publishers. Peer review evaluations are aggregated by Sciety, visit Groups on Sciety for more information.

The review or evaluation will include the name of the review source and a link to the review, and if available it will also include a logo for the source, the author or referee of the review, and the date of the review. If dates are available, a timeline will display with the most recent event at the bottom.

Protocols & materials

To aid reproducibility of research, Europe PMC includes links from articles to protocols and materials such as cell line which were used for the study, in the Protocols and Materials section of the article page.

Lay summaries

A lay summary aims to summarise scientific research in an accessible way, interpreting complex scientific ideas and findings for people without scientific training, for example journalists, policy makers, patients and professionals working in the health and fitness industry. The Lay summary section includes press releases and summaries from external websites.

Similar articles

To arrive at the top five similar articles an algorithm is used to compare words from the Title and Abstract of each article.

Funding

The funding section contains details of grants and funders that supported the research. If the research was funded by a Europe PMC funder, a link to the grant details page will be provided, where you can find a description of the grant, Principal Investigator names and affiliations and the amount and dates of the grant award.

Key terms

Key terms, are text-mined, biological entities and concepts, or annotations on the article text, which can be highlighted, making it easier to scan an article quickly and extract useful information and evidence. In addition to entities (gene/protein names, organisms, diseases, chemicals, Gene Ontology terms), Key terms highlights biological events (e.g. phosphorylation), functional relations (e.g. gene–disease associations, protein–protein interactions), as well as biological functions (e.g. gene function). For more information on using key terms, or contributing annotations to Europe PMC, visit the SciLite annotations page.

Report incorrect annotations

If you spot an incorrect annotation, or the annotation is too generic and is highlighted too often, you can report it by clicking or tapping on the highlighted term and using the 'Feedback' link in the popup window. You can also endorse annotations using the Feedback link, if they are useful to you.

Why do Key terms not appear on every full-text article in Europe PMC?

Europe PMC is only able to highlight Key terms on articles with a CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, CC0, CC-BY-SA OR CC-BY-NC-SA license. Currently this represents about 6.1 million articles.

With the Advanced Search form you can more precisely find any of the data or resource links by specifying the provider of interest in the External Links drop-down at the bottom of the form as shown below:

Participate in the Europe PMC external links service

The external links service is a mechanism for external providers to publish links from articles in Europe PMC to related data, information or tools. More information on the service can be found using the link on the top navigation bar (see Tools > External links service), or directly at External links service.

Please email us at [email protected], briefly describing the links you wish to share. We will assign you with the information you need to generate the files and upload your links.

Link articles to your ORCID

Europe PMC offers researchers the ability to link articles to their ORCID (a unique researcher ID).

To claim an article you are viewing

1. Find the article. Find the article on EUROPE PMC that you would like to claim to your ORCID profile.
2. Give ORCID permission to claim the article. Find the "Claim to ORCID" link in the right hand column, follow it to give ORCID permission to claim the article. You will then be directed to sign into ORCID, and afterwards a popup will confirm that your article has been claimed.

To view and claim multiple articles that might be authored by you

1. Find the ORCID article claiming tool. Select Tools > ORCID article claiming on Europe PMC.
2. Select your publications. After you have signed in via ORCID, Europe PMC presents you with a list of articles using the names and initials in your ORCID profile (from articles within Europe PMC). Select the publications that you wish to link using the check-box next to the article title.
3. Review your bibliography and send to ORCID. Check the articles that you have selected and update your ORCID profile with the articles by using the 'send to ORCID' button.

The associations made using the article claiming tool become available in Europe PMC within a few minutes. Find out more about how ORCIDs are displayed and used on Europe PMC.

Author profiles

If you have an ORCID iD, then by default you will have a Europe PMC profile page. An ORCID iD is a unique identifier which distinguishes you from other researchers. All data displayed on Europe PMC author profiles is openly available from Europe PMC and ORCID.org. Any publications which you have linked to your ORCID iD (and are marked as visible to Public, Everyone, or Trusted Parties) will be displayed on your Europe PMC profile page.

You can download an image of the chart on your profile (in PNG, JPEG, PDF or SVG format) to include in your CV or website by using the Download chart button.

Why are there no publications displayed on my author profile?

There are two possible reasons why publications are not displaying on your Europe PMC author profile:

1. You have not linked any of your publications in Europe PMC to your ORCID iD. Use our simple tool to link your articles to your ORCID iD.
2. Your 'works' in your ORCID profile are marked as only being visible to you. You will need to update your ORCID visibility settings.

If you have any problems linking publications to your ORCID iD, please contact the Helpdesk.

Prevent publications from being displayed on your author profile

Modify your visibility settings on the ORCID website. Any publications marked as Private or Only Me will not be displayed on your Europe PMC profile.

Accessing another author's profile

All author profiles on Europe PMC are public. There are various ways to access an author's profile, including:

• Search for the author by name in the main search bar. Up to two suggested authors, who have linked their ORCID to Europe PMC, are shown at the top of the search results. The authors with the most publications are shown first.
• Link to an author's profile from an article page, under the section 'ORCIDs linked to this article'.
• Search for the author by name in the Advanced Search - if they have an ORCID iD which has been linked to Europe PMC it will be displayed in the suggestions.
• Enter the author's ORCID iD in the main search box.

Open citations on author profiles

On Europe PMC author profile pages, open citations are based on the reference sections of articles which are available through open data sets. This includes full text articles in Europe PMC and citation services such as CrossRef. Find out more about Europe PMC's citation network.

Submit a manuscript

Authors funded by at least one of the Europe PMC Funders can submit an author manuscript for inclusion in Europe PMC. Each submission must be approved by the Principal Investigator (PI) although colleagues may submit documents on their behalf.

To submit a manuscript, access Europe PMC plus and login. Detailed help guides supporting the submission process can be found on Europe PMC plus.

Saved alerts

Finding saved alerts

After you save an alert, you can access saved alerts from the My account page, in the drop-down in the top-right corner of the website.

Finding saved searches

Queries saved as "Saved searches" prior to the "Saved alerts" feature, will be listed on the Saved alerts page, and you will have the option to convert them to alerts and set a frequency for updates.

What you can do from the Saved alerts page

From the Saved alerts page, you can

• Create a new alert.
• Edit your alerts email to change where the emails are sent.
• Click on any saved alert to re-run the search and see all results.
• See the frequency that has been selected for each alert, or whether it's an inactive alert (When no frequency is selected.)
• Edit any saved alert.
• Delete any saved alert.
• Connect your accounts if you used different logins and saved alerts to different accounts.

Europe PMC Accounts

With a Europe PMC account you can sign in to save search queries. Other features will be added in future.

How to sign into Europe PMC

You can sign into Europe PMC, to save your searches, with external services including ORCID, Twitter and Europe PMC Plus. Alternatively you can create a Europe PMC account.

• Sign in with ORCID

  You will be taken to a page on the ORCID website where you can either enter your ORCID login details or create a new ORCID account. You will be redirected back to Europe PMC after signing in.

• Sign in with Twitter

  You will be taken to a page on the Twitter website where (providing you are already logged into Twitter via your web browser) you simply authorise Europe PMC to use your Twitter account. You will be redirected back to Europe PMC after authorisation.

• Sign in with Europe PMC Plus

  You can now sign in with a Europe PMC Plus account. You will be taken to the Plus website and redirected back to Europe PMC after signing in.

• Sign in with Europe PMC

  You can sign in with a Europe PMC account. This is not the same as the Europe PMC Plus account, which is used to submit manuscripts. You will need to register to create a new Europe PMC account. Find out how to create a Europe PMC account.

Create a Europe PMC account

Click the 'create an account' link at the very top of the site header.

You will be taken to a form where you can enter your name, email address a password to create a new Europe PMC account.

After submitting the registration form you will receive an email with an account activation link. Once you have activated your account you will be able to access your first saved search query and save additional search queries.

I have created a Europe PMC account but I can't access my saved searches

You may not have activated your Europe PMC account. Please check your email for the activation link.

You may have saved searches using another sign-in (eg. ORCID or Twitter). You can connect the accounts to merge your saved searches into one account.

How to delete your user account

Access the 'Manage account' link from your display name in the top right corner. The 'Delete account' option can be found in the left menu.