PubMed

Mode: 🌐 Public · Domain: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Commands

Command	Description
opencli pubmed search	Search PubMed articles with filters
opencli pubmed article	Get article metadata and abstract by PMID
opencli pubmed author	Search articles by author and affiliation
opencli pubmed citations	List cited-by or reference relationships
opencli pubmed related	Find related PubMed articles

Usage Examples

# Search articles
opencli pubmed search "machine learning cancer" --year-from 2023 --has-abstract --limit 10

# Search by author
opencli pubmed author "Smith J" --position first --affiliation Harvard

# Read one article by PMID
opencli pubmed article 37780221 --full-abstract

# Citation relationships
opencli pubmed citations 37780221 --direction citedby --limit 20
opencli pubmed citations 37780221 --direction references --limit 20

# Related articles with scores
opencli pubmed related 37780221 --score

Output

Listing commands return pmid, title, authors, journal, year, article_type, doi, and url where available. The pmid column is the stable identifier for opencli pubmed article <pmid>.

article returns field/value rows for title, authors, journal, year/date, DOI/PMC ID, MeSH terms, keywords, abstract, and PubMed URL.

Prerequisites

• No browser required. Commands use the NCBI E-utilities public API.
• Optional: set NCBI_API_KEY for the higher NCBI rate limit.
• Optional: set NCBI_EMAIL so NCBI can identify your tool usage.

export NCBI_API_KEY=YOUR_API_KEY
export NCBI_EMAIL=[email protected]

Failure Semantics

• Invalid pmid, limit, year, sort, position, or direction values fail before network access with ArgumentError.
• HTTP errors, fetch failures, invalid JSON, E-utilities error envelopes, and partial summary payloads fail with CommandExecutionError.
• Valid no-result searches and missing relationships fail with EmptyResultError.