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PubMed

NCBI PubMed is the primary biomedical literature database providing free access to over 35 million citations and abstracts from life science journals and online books. The Entrez Programming Utilities (E-utilities) REST API enables programmatic searching, retrieval, and linking of citations, article metadata, abstracts, full-text links, and MeSH terms across PubMed and 38 other NCBI databases.

agent ready

Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles PubMed the way a machine reads it — 25 machine-readable artifacts across 10 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 — PubMed scores 43.4/100 (thin), 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 — 43.4/100 · thin
Contract Quality 16.2 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 2.6 / 20
Commercial Clarity 5.8 / 20
Operational Transparency 0.0 / 13
Governance 8.8 / 12
Discoverability 10.0 / 10
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 PubMed

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for PubMed. 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 10

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.

PubMed Central OA API

The PMC Open Access API provides citation data, license information, and download links for Open Access articles in PubMed Central. Supports filtering by date and license type, ...

PMC OAI-PMH API

The PMC OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) API enables systematic harvesting of metadata for all PMC archive items and full text for licensed co...

PMC BioC API

The BioC API provides full text retrieval of PubMed Central Open Access articles in BioC XML or JSON format, optimized for natural language processing (NLP) and text mining appl...

PMC ID Converter API

The PMC ID Converter API translates between different article identifier formats including PubMed IDs (PMIDs), PubMed Central IDs (PMCIDs), Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), an...

PubMed History API

Operations for managing sets of records on the Entrez History server

PubMed Info API

Operations for retrieving database metadata and information

PubMed Links API

Operations for finding linked records between databases

PubMed Retrieval API

Operations for retrieving records from Entrez databases

PubMed Search API

Operations for searching Entrez databases

PubMed Summary API

Operations for retrieving document summaries

Scroll within the panel for all 10 ·

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.

Entrez Eutils

2 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.

Entrez Eutils

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.

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.

Pubmed Article Example Context

0 classes · 0 properties

JSON-LD

Pubmed Context

4 classes · 30 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.

PubMed API Rules

6 rules · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 2

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.

ESearch Response

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

PubMed Article

23 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Examples 4

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.

Efetch Abstracts

4 fields

EXAMPLE

Elink Related Articles

4 fields

EXAMPLE

Esearch Pubmed

3 fields

EXAMPLE

Esummary Pubmed

3 fields

EXAMPLE

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.

Pubmed Authentication

apiKey · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Pubmed 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.

Pubmed Agentic Access

9 operations · 1 acting

9 operations · 1 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for PubMed — 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.

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Company 1

The organization behind the API

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