GET /ecitmatch.fcgi

nih.gov:ncbi-e-utilities

Summary: Match citations to PubMed IDs
Operation ID: ecitmatch
Auth: unknown
Description

ECitMatch retrieves PubMed IDs (PMIDs) that correspond to a set of input citation strings.

Parameters (4)

api_key (string, query, optional)

NCBI API key for higher rate limits

bdata (string, query, required)

Citation strings in pipe-delimited format: journal_title|year|volume|first_page|author_name|your_key|. Multiple citations separated by carriage return (%0D).

db (string, query, required)

Database to search (only 'pubmed' is supported)

Constraints: {'enum': ['pubmed']}

rettype (string, query, optional)

Return type. Use 'xml' for XML output.

Constraints: {'enum': ['xml']}

Examples (3)

TitleTypeURLAction
Basic citation to PMID lookup curl https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/ecitmatch.fcgi?db=pubmed&bdata=Nature%7C2023%7C615%7C1%7CSmith%7Cref1
Citation lookup with XML output format curl https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/ecitmatch.fcgi?db=pubmed&rettype=xml&bdata=Science%7C2022%7C375%7C100%7CJones%7Cref2
Multiple citations batch lookup curl https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/ecitmatch.fcgi?db=pubmed&bdata=Nature%7C2023%7C615%7C1%7CSmith%7Cref1%0AScience%7C2022%7C375%7C100%7CJones%7Cref2%0ACell%7C2021%7C184%7C50%7CBrown%7Cref3

Probe History

Latency

Status Codes

TimeStatusLatencySize
2026-03-23 10:24:49.129501 200 1147ms
2026-03-23 10:08:53.251725 200 1175ms
2026-03-23 09:07:19.001400 200 1128ms

Response Changes

WhenOldNew
2026-03-23 10:08:53.251725 9182a8d80e36 092db885387e
2026-03-23 10:24:49.129501 092db885387e 366bca4be299