PubMed Has a Free API — Search 36M+ Medical Papers Programmatically

I was building a health-tech prototype last week. Needed medical research data. Expected paywalls everywhere. Then I found PubMed's E-utilities API. 36 million biomedical papers. Free. No API key. No signup. What Is PubMed? PubMed is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's database — the world's largest collection of biomedical literature. It's run by NIH (National Institutes of Health), and they provide free programmatic access to everything. If you work with health data, drug research, clinical trials, or biomedical NLP — this is your goldmine. Your First API Call (Zero Setup) curl "https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=pubmed&term=artificial+intelligence&retmode=json&retmax=3" That returns 364,000+ results for "artificial intelligence" in biomedical literature. Full Python Example: Search and Fetch Papers import requests # Step 1: Search for papers search_url = " https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi " search_params = { " db " : " pubmed