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How To Download A Few Hundred Pdfs From Pubmed

What is the best way to download PDFs from PubMed programmatically. For example, given a PubMed URL:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9016068

Whats the best way to obtain the PDF of the paper? I've tried to use NCBI eutils and other things, but can't seem to find a solution. Thanks for your time.

pubmed

2 answers

See the PubmedPDF : https://github.com/elfar/PubmedPDF

This program tries to download a PDF file for the given comma-separated pubmed IDs

any idea how do you convert doi to pubmed id?

Hello, I can confirm that it Bill's update works in Windows 10 with Ruby 2.2.0. To get it to run in Windows via the Windows cmd command line you need to put quotes around the list of PMIDs

I found this post online: http://bioinformatics.risha.me/tag/eutils/

I have used eutils a lot but have never used it to get pdf version of any paper. First of all, I don't think PMC or Pubmed Central has access to the full articles for all the PMID's. I think for most of the times they only give you title and abstract information. Second thing is that you can download the xml files containing full text for the articles (in case the full text is available) present in PMC but I don't think you can get a pdf for the articles.

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