PubMed Search Articles

Overview

Search PubMed biomedical literature database using NCBI E-utilities (esearch + esummary). Returns articles with PMID, title, authors, journal, publication year, DOI, article type, and PubMed URL. Automatically fetches rich metadata for each article. Use this to discover medical/life sciences literature, find articles by topic, or search for publications by author or journal. Rate limiting is automatically handled (3 req/sec without API key, 10 req/sec with key set via NCBI_API_KEY environment variable).

Status

The most recent probe succeeded. Safe to call from the agent today.

Last probed

1d ago

Last success

1d ago

Last latency

103ms

Schema

JSON Schema the agent (or your API call) must match.

{
  "properties": {
    "datetype": {
      "default": "pdat",
      "description": "Type of date to filter on: 'pdat' (publication date), 'edat' (Entrez date), or 'mdat' (modification date). Required when using mindate/maxdate.",
      "type": "string"
    },
    "include_abstract": {
      "default": false,
      "description": "If true, best-effort fetches abstracts via efetch (adds abstract/abstract_source fields).",
      "type": "boolean"
    },
    "limit": {
      "default": 10,
      "description": "Number of articles to return. This sets the maximum number of articles retrieved from PubMed (max: 200).",
      "type": "integer"
    },
    "max_results": {
      "description": "Alias for limit — maximum number of results to return",
      "type": "integer"
    },
    "maxdate": {
      "description": "Maximum date for results (format: YYYY/MM/DD or YYYY). Requires datetype to be set.",
      "type": "string"
    },
    "mindate": {
      "description": "Minimum date for results (format: YYYY/MM/DD or YYYY). Requires datetype to be set.",
      "type": "string"
    },
    "query": {
      "description": "Search query for PubMed articles. Use keywords, author names, journal names, or MeSH terms. Examples: 'cancer immunotherapy', 'Smith J[Author]', 'Nature[Journal]', 'diabetes[MeSH]'. Use AND/OR/NOT for complex queries.",
      "type": "string"
    },
    "sort": {
      "description": "Sort order for results. Valid values: 'pub_date' (newest first), 'Author' (alphabetical by first author), 'JournalName' (alphabetical by journal), 'relevance' (default PubMed ranking).",
      "type": "string"
    }
  },
  "required": [
    "query"
  ],
  "type": "object"
}

Examples (1)

{
  "include_abstract": false,
  "limit": 3,
  "max_results": 1,
  "query": "BRCA1"
}

Identifiers

Catalog ID

tu_PubMed_search_articles

Tool name

PubMed_search_articles

Added

2026-04-30 22:47Z

Tags

tooluniverse