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National Institutes of Health (NIH) website screenshot

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) provides a suite of public REST APIs for biomedical research, including PubMed literature search via E-utilities, ClinicalTrials.gov clinical trial data, chemical compound data through PubChem, gene and genome databases via NCBI Datasets, BLAST sequence alignment, and NIH research funding data through RePORTER.

agent ready

Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles National Institutes of Health (NIH) the way a machine reads it — 44 machine-readable artifacts across 15 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — National Institutes of Health (NIH) scores 48.4/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 48/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 48.4/100 · developing
Contract Quality 14.5 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 4.3 / 20
Commercial Clarity 10.0 / 20
Operational Transparency 2.7 / 13
Governance 8.8 / 12
Discoverability 10.0 / 10
Regulatory · Health 5.6 / 15
Agent readiness — 48/100 · agent ready
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for National Institutes of Health (NIH). For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 15

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

NCBI E-utilities (Entrez Programming Utilities)

The public API to the NCBI Entrez system providing programmatic access to all Entrez databases including PubMed, PMC, Gene, Nuccore, and Protein. Supports searching, fetching, l...

PubChem Power User Gateway (PUG REST)

Suite of REST APIs providing programmatic access to PubChem chemical compound data, including chemical structure searches, compound properties, biological assay data, and chemic...

NIH RePORTER API

REST API providing programmatic access to NIH-funded research project data including grants, contracts, publications, and patents. Enables search and retrieval of funding record...

NCBI BLAST URL API

API enabling developers to submit BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) sequence searches via HTTPS for processing at NCBI or cloud service providers, check job status, and ...

PubMed Central (PMC) OA API

APIs for programmatic access to PubMed Central's Open Access content, including file validation, Open Access service, and an ID converter for translating between PMCID, PMID, Ma...

National Institutes of Health (NIH) BioSample API

#### Options to download BioSample data. This BioSample service allows you to get BioSample data as a data report.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Gene API

#### Options to download gene data, including the associated sequence and metadata. These gene services allow you to get gene metadata as a data report or download gene, transcr...

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Genome API

#### Options to download assembled genome data, including the associated sequence, annotation and metadata. These genome services allow you to get genome metadata as a data repo...

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Organelle API

#### Options to download RefSeq organelle genome data, including the associated sequence and metadata. These organelle services allow you to get RefSeq organelle genome metadata...

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Prokaryote API

#### Options to download prokaryote gene data, including the associated sequence and metadata. These gene services allow you to download gene and protein sequence, and metadata ...

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Studies API

Related to clinical trial studies

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Taxonomy API

#### Options to download taxonomy data. These taxonomy services allow you to get taxonomy data as a data report or download taxonomy data as a taxonomy data package, for taxonom...

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Virus API

#### Options to download virus genome data, including the associated sequence and metadata. These virus services allow you to get virus genome metadata as a data report or downl...

Scroll within the panel for all 15 ·

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Nih Plans Pricing

5 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Nih Rate Limits

0 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Nih Finops

FINOPS

Semantic Vocabularies 2

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Nih Apis Context

0 classes · 0 properties

JSON-LD

Nih Context

8 classes · 10 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 1

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) API Rules

5 rules · 3 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 14

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

EnumInfo

3 properties

JSON SCHEMA

EnumStats

6 properties

JSON SCHEMA

FieldNode

16 properties

JSON SCHEMA

SearchArea

4 properties

JSON SCHEMA

SearchDocument

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

StringStats

7 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Study

6 properties

JSON SCHEMA

StudySize

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

v2AssemblyDatasetAvailability

3 properties

JSON SCHEMA

v2AssemblyDatasetRequest

5 properties

JSON SCHEMA

v2DownloadSummary

8 properties

JSON SCHEMA

v2GeneDatasetReportsRequest

16 properties

JSON SCHEMA

v2TaxonomyNode

17 properties

JSON SCHEMA

v2VirusDatasetRequest

17 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Scroll within the panel for all 14 ·

Examples 6

Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.

Example request and response payloads for these APIs.

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Nih Authentication

apiKey · 2 schemes

SECURITY

Nih Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Nih Agentic Access

116 operations · 41 acting

116 operations · 41 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for National Institutes of Health (NIH) — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Documentation 1

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Operate 2

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

Commercial 3

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

Company 3

The organization behind the API

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/nih · machine-readable index on apis.io