pubmed-markdown 0.2.5

Convert PubMed articles (PMIDs or PMCIDs) to clean, structured markdown with full text, abstracts, and supplementary materials

PubMed Downloader

Convert PubMed articles to clean, structured markdown. Handles the full pipeline: PMID resolution, full-text extraction via PubMed Central, HTML-to-markdown conversion, and supplementary material retrieval.

Articles without open-access full text automatically fall back to abstract-only download.

Installation

pip install pubmed-markdown

Requires Python 3.11+.

Setup

Set your email for NCBI API identification (required to avoid 403 errors):

export NCBI_EMAIL=[e-mail]

Or pass it directly:

downloader = PubMedMarkdown(email="[e-mail]")

Quick Start

from pubmed_markdown import PubMedMarkdown

downloader = PubMedMarkdown()

# Get markdown string from a PMID
markdown = downloader.pmid_to_markdown("12895196")

Usage

Python API

Get markdown strings (single or batch, no files created):

from pubmed_markdown import PubMedMarkdown

downloader = PubMedMarkdown()

# From PMID — accepts a single string or a list
markdown = downloader.pmid_to_markdown("12895196")
markdowns = downloader.pmid_to_markdown(["12895196", "17872605"])

# From PMCID directly — also accepts a single string or a list
markdown = downloader.pmcid_to_markdown("PMC1884285")
markdowns = downloader.pmcid_to_markdown(["PMC1884285", "PMC6435416"])

# Skip supplementary materials
markdown = downloader.pmid_to_markdown("12895196", include_supplements=False)

Save markdown files to disk (single or batch):

from pubmed_markdown import PubMedMarkdown

downloader = PubMedMarkdown()
downloader.pmids_to_markdown_files(["12895196", "17872605"], save_dir="data")

# Also works with a single PMID
downloader.pmids_to_markdown_files("25051018", save_dir="data")

# Overwrite existing files
downloader.pmids_to_markdown_files(["12895196"], save_dir="data", overwrite=True)

This creates:

data/
├── html/          # Raw HTML from PMC
└── markdown/      # Converted markdown files

Full-text articles are saved as {PMCID}.md. Articles without open-access full text are saved as PMID{PMID}.md with abstract only.

Individual utility functions:

from pubmed_markdown import (
    get_pmcid_from_pmid,
    get_html_from_pmcid,
    get_abstract_markdown_from_pmid,
    fetch_bioc_supplement,
    format_supplement_as_markdown,
)

# Resolve PMIDs to PMCIDs (returns dict mapping PMID -> PMCID or None)
mapping = get_pmcid_from_pmid(["12895196", "17872605"])

# Fetch raw HTML from PMC
html = get_html_from_pmcid("PMC1884285")

# Get abstract for non-open-access articles
abstract_md = get_abstract_markdown_from_pmid("12345678")

# Get raw supplementary material text
supplement = fetch_bioc_supplement("PMC6435416")

# Get supplementary materials formatted as a markdown section
supplement_md = format_supplement_as_markdown("PMC6435416")

Command Line

# Convert PMIDs from a file (one PMID per line)
pubmed-download --file_path=pmids.txt --save_dir=data

# Overwrite existing files
pubmed-download --file_path=pmids.txt --save_dir=data --overwrite

# Specify email directly
pubmed-download --file_path=pmids.txt --email=[e-mail]

API Reference

Method	Creates Files	Returns	Use Case
pmid_to_markdown()	No	Markdown string(s)	Single or batch, programmatic use
pmcid_to_markdown()	No	Markdown string(s)	Direct PMCID conversion
pmids_to_markdown_files()	Yes	None	Batch processing, building datasets
pmids_to_pmcids()	No	List of PMCIDs	PMID to PMCID resolution
pmcids_to_html()	Yes	None	Fetch and save raw HTML
local_html_to_markdown()	Yes	None	Re-convert existing HTML files

All methods accepting IDs take either a single string or a list of strings.

How It Works

1. PMID to PMCID -- Uses NCBI's ID Converter API with batching and rate limiting
2. HTML extraction -- Fetches full article HTML from PubMed Central
3. Markdown conversion -- Converts HTML to structured markdown preserving tables, figures, citations, and references
4. Supplementary materials -- Fetches pre-processed supplement text via NCBI's BioC API
5. Abstract fallback -- Articles not in PMC Open Access get abstract + metadata via NCBI E-Fetch

Configuration

Environment Variable	Default	Description
NCBI_EMAIL	None	Email for NCBI API identification

License

MIT