How to use the Bulk FTP Download service at ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc?

The Bulk FTP Download service at ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc allows you to download article metadata in bulk for PMC Open Access Subset, Author Manuscript Dataset, and Historical OCR Dataset.

Bulk FTP Download files are organized into sub-directories and files as shown below:

/oa_bulk/ 
  oa_comm/  
    txt/
      oa_comm_txt.PMC001xxxxxx.baseline.2022-09-08.filelist.csv 
      oa_comm_txt.PMC001xxxxxx.baseline.2022-09-08.filelist.txt 
      oa_comm_txt.PMC001xxxxxx.baseline.2022-09-08.tar.gz 
      oa_comm_txt.PMC002xxxxxx.baseline.2022-09-08.filelist.csv 
      oa_comm_txt.PMC002xxxxxx.baseline.2022-09-08.filelist.txt 
      oa_comm_txt.PMC002xxxxxx.baseline.2022-09-08.tar.gz  
       ...
      oa_comm_txt.incr.2022-09-09.filelist.csv
      oa_comm_txt.incr.2022-09-09.filelist.txt
      oa_comm_txt.incr.2022-09-09.tar.gz      
      ...
    xml/
      ...
  oa_noncomm/   
      ...
  oa_other/     
      ...
/manuscript/ 
      ...
/historical_ocr/ 
      ...

File names use different key words to help you identify the format and content of each file. For example:

• oa_comm_txt - Open Access Subset, commercial use license, article metadata stored in plain text format.
• PMC001xxxxxx - Articles with PMC IDs in the range of 1000000 to 1999999.
• baseline - Baseline file contains all articles created before the given date.
• 2022-09-08 - The given date.
• filelist - Contains a list of files, one per article, in the .tar.gz file
• csv - "filelist" in CSV format.
• txt - "filelist" in plain text format.
• tar.gz - Metadata of bulk articles archived as .tar and compressed as .gz.
• incr - Incremental file contains all articles updated on the given date.

The "filelist" file contains several fields as shown in the following example:

Article File - PMC007xxxxxx/PMC7963522.xml
Article Citation - J Am Pharm Assoc (2003). 2021 Mar 17 July-August; 61(4):366
AccessionID - PMC7963522
LastUpdated - 2022-10-10 23:35:56
PMID - 33814324
License - NO-CC CODE
Retracted - no

⇒ PMC FTP Service - Article Package Download

⇐ ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc - FTP Service

⇑ PubMed Central (PMC) DOI Database

⇑⇑ DOI - Frequently Asked Questions