PubMed Central & Europe PMC
About the resource
PubMed Central (PMC) was launched by the NIH in 2000 as a free full-text archive; Europe PMC, run by EMBL-EBI since 2007, mirrors PMC and adds significant European content, preprints and grant linkage from a broad funder consortium. The two together act as the open-access counterpart to PubMed: many disease-research papers indexed in PubMed are available as full text in PMC, and millions of additional records — patents, theses, preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv, NIH and Europe-PMC funder reports — are searchable alongside.
For disease researchers, the full-text tier matters because key data — supplementary tables, methods, ontology mappings, cohort characteristics — is rarely in the abstract. Europe PMC's article-level annotations (genes, diseases, chemicals, gene ontologies, accession numbers) and SPARQL endpoint make it particularly useful for building text-mined evidence into knowledge graphs.
What you'd use it for
- 01Read the actual paper when an abstract isn't decisive
- 02Mine supplementary tables for cohort or variant data
- 03Track preprints alongside peer-reviewed literature
- 04Build text-mining pipelines against Europe PMC's annotation API