What are the Europe PMC content sources?

Europe PMC provides access to a wide range of over 46 million life science literature records, including:

• all journal article abstracts from PubMed/MEDLINE
• selected journal article abstracts from Agricola
• full text journal articles from PubMed Central (PMC)
• preprints from 34 preprint servers, including bioRxiv and medRxiv
• books from the NCBI Bookshelf
• biomedical PhD theses from the EThOS database by British Library.

Europe PMC also includes full text author manuscripts supported by Europe PMC funders. Such manuscripts become available in PMC USA and Europe PMC, and can be submitted via the Europe PMC Plus submission system.

All the content indexed in Europe PMC, including data from PubMed and PMC, is stored in Europe PMC’s independent database, hosted at EMBL-EBI.

Is Europe PMC a mirror of PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC)?

Europe PMC is a mirror of PubMed, meaning it includes all journal article abstracts available in MEDLINE and PubMed, ensuring that the same content is accessible on both platforms.

Europe PMC is also a mirror of PubMed Central (PMC), meaning it includes the same content as PMC, with the exception of 27,686 articles predating the PMC International agreement from July 2006 between Europe PMC and PMC USA. This includes titles that have ceased publication. For such articles, an abstract is displayed if it is available in PubMed.

Content from PubMed and PMC is retrieved daily. 

In addition to mirroring PubMed and PMC, Europe PMC includes other content, such as preprints, theses, and agricultural publications.

Why do search results differ between Europe PMC and PubMed/PubMed Central?

Europe PMC search results may differ from PubMed or PubMed Central due to differences in search methodology and technology. 

Searches in PubMed are limited to abstracts. Searches in PMC are limited to the full text of articles deposited in PMC and do not include abstracts from PubMed. Europe PMC searches all abstracts from PubMed and all full text from PMC, where available. This broad search scope may result in a higher number of search results. 

For a more targeted approach it is possible to limit the search in Europe PMC to article title, abstract, or a specific article section, for example Methods or Results. 

Search results may also differ because Europe PMC includes records that are not available in PubMed or PMC, such as preprints or theses.

How is content removed from Europe PMC?

Europe PMC is an archive of life science literature and conforms with EMBL-EBI’s long-term data preservation policies.

The content removal process depends on the data source. For example, guidance regarding the deletion of PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC) records is listed on the NCBI disclaimer and PMC Policies pages. Europe PMC is automatically notified about removal requests for PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), NCBI Bookshelf, and Agricola records. Such requests are monitored by the Europe PMC team. 

Preprint withdrawals and removals are automatically identified based on title changes and can be tracked using the Article status monitor. 

On request from authors, preprints can be deleted by the Europe PMC Helpdesk.

How is Europe PMC funded?

Europe PMC is publicly funded by 35 international research funders, providing a broad funding base that ensures long-term financial resilience. It receives in-kind support from European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), with strong technical infrastructure provided by EMBL-EBI, which manages the world’s most comprehensive suite of public data resources.

Europe PMC aligns with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) and is committed to providing high-quality, sustainable, open and community-driven infrastructure for open data. 

Europe PMC is an ELIXIR Core Data Resource and a Global Core Biodata Resource, due to its fundamental importance to the life-science community and the long-term preservation of biological data.

How is Europe PMC different from other literature databases?

Access to over 46 million abstracts and full text articles

Europe PMC is a comprehensive resource of life science literature, including peer reviewed journal articles, preprints, books, and theses. When the full text is not available in Europe PMC, users are directed to legal, free, full text copies through an integration with Unpaywall service.

Articles linked to relevant information

Europe PMC connects research articles with other relevant resources, including associated data, protocols and materials, funding, citations, and more. To establish trust in preprints, Europe PMC links them to expert peer reviews and published journal versions.

Customisable and powerful search

Compared to other search engines, Europe PMC searches both abstracts and full text articles, allowing users to find a greater number of relevant results. The Europe PMC search is flexible and versatile. It enables users to customise their queries to find articles cited by a specific publication or articles based on a preprint. They can find papers that describe a specific protein structure or cite a genome sequence. 

The use of ORCID, a unique identifier for research authors, makes it possible to refine the author search in Europe PMC, and receive author suggestions based on their ORCID record. Europe PMC also offers a Grant finder tool for biomedical grants from 35 life science funders.

Highlighting biological terms in text

Europe PMC uses text mining and machine learning to extract biological terms and relations from abstracts and full text of publications and preprints. The Annotations tool highlights mentions of chemicals, organisms, experimental methods, or gene-disease-drug interactions in the text.

ORCID linking and policy compliance

Authors can get credit for their work by adding articles to their ORCID profile using Europe PMC’s ORCID claiming tool. Europe PMC allows authors funded by Europe PMC funders to make their publications publicly available and meet open access funder policies using the Europe PMC Plus manuscript submission system.

Open APIs for exploration and reuse

Europe PMC offers powerful open APIs and bulk data downloads for technical users. Publications and related information are accessible via the Articles API, grant information via the Grants API, and text-mined annotations via the Annotations API. To make it easier to programmatically search and retrieve specific research outputs, Europe PMC integrates persistent identifiers, such as ORCIDs for research authors, DOIs for grants and ROR IDs for affiliations. 

All of Europe PMC’s open codebase is available via our public repository. Whether you’re building research tools or conducting large-scale analyses, the Europe PMC platform is built to support the exploration and reuse of scientific research and data. 

Driven by the community, powered by open access 

Europe PMC is an open science resource, available to anyone, anywhere for free. As a not-for-profit platform, hosted by EMBL-EBI and supported by a coalition of public funders, Europe PMC is independent and community driven. Our mission is to serve the research community by building open, full-text scientific literature resources and supporting innovation and discovery by engaging users, enabling contributors, and integrating related research outputs.