Pay-per-query research trend analytics from 36M+ PubMed articles via x402/MPP in USDC.
What it does
PubMed Trends API provides publication trend analytics drawn from over 36 million PubMed articles and OpenAlex data. It exposes 11 GET endpoints covering year-by-year trend analysis, cross-term comparison, emerging topic detection, weekly spike ranking, sub-topic discovery, recent publication pulse, key paper scoring, researcher profiles, and more. All endpoints are JSON-first and designed for LLM agents and data pipelines rather than dashboards.
Payment is handled per-query via the x402 protocol (USDC on Base L2) or MPP (USDC on Tempo). Prices range from $0.01 for a simple snapshot or trend query up to $0.10 for cross-domain exploration. No API keys or subscriptions are required — an agent sends a standard HTTP GET, receives a 402 challenge with payment instructions, signs a USDC transfer, and retries with proof to receive data.
The API supports two data sources: PubMed (via NCBI) for MeSH-based category queries and OpenAlex for free-text topic searches. Endpoints return structured JSON with metrics like CAGR, spike ratios, year-over-year growth, z-scores, and scored paper lists with PMIDs. Use cases include automated weekly research surveillance, biotech due diligence, grant writing support, and single-call lookups for trending topics. The service pairs with Anthropic's PubMed MCP for a trend-to-abstract workflow in as few as three calls.
Capabilities
Use cases
- —Automated weekly research monitoring — a cron job watches a therapeutic area and sends a briefing
- —Biotech scientific due diligence — evaluate a company's research positioning in a few API calls
- —Grant writing assistance — populate Significance sections with emerging trends and key papers
- —Single-call lookups — what's hot in oncology this week, or who is a specific researcher
- —Agent-driven literature review pipelines combining trend data with PubMed MCP abstracts
Fit
Best for
- —AI agents needing structured biomedical trend data without API key management
- —Biotech analysts performing rapid scientific landscape assessments
- —Research teams automating publication surveillance across therapeutic areas
- —LLM-powered grant writing or literature review workflows
Not for
- —Full-text article retrieval — this API returns trend analytics and metadata, not paper content
- —High-volume bulk PubMed data dumps — per-query pricing adds up at scale
- —Non-biomedical literature searches — data is scoped to PubMed and OpenAlex biomedical corpora
Quick start
# Using awal (Coinbase agent wallet CLI)
awal x402 pay 'https://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/api/v1/trends?query=CRISPR'
# Or with curl + x402 client
curl 'https://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/api/v1/trends?query=CRISPR&start_year=2018&end_year=2025'Example
Response
{
"data": [
{
"year": 2024,
"count": 8764,
"proportion": 0.00504,
"yoy_growth": 0.074,
"total_pubmed": 1737687
}
],
"query": "CRISPR",
"end_year": 2025,
"analytics": {
"cagr": 0.052,
"peak_year": 2024,
"peak_count": 8764,
"acceleration": 0,
"trend_direction": "growing"
},
"start_year": 2018,
"total_results": 48523
}Endpoint
Quality
The landing page and docs are detailed with endpoint descriptions, parameters, example responses, and pricing. However, the probe returned 404 on both GET and POST for this specific endpoint (/api/v1/hottest), which does not match any documented endpoint (the documented variant is /api/v1/hottest-weekly). No 402 challenge was captured, and no OpenAPI schema is available. The endpoint as listed appears to be an incorrect path.
Warnings
- —Probe returned 404 on both GET and POST — the endpoint /api/v1/hottest does not appear to exist. The documented endpoint is /api/v1/hottest-weekly.
- —No x402 402 challenge was captured during probing, so live payment flow could not be verified for this specific URL.
- —No OpenAPI/JSON schema is published; documentation is HTML only.
- —No /pricing page found (404); prices are only listed on the docs and landing pages.
Citations
- —The API covers 36M+ PubMed articles with trend analyticshttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz
- —11 endpoints ranging from $0.01 to $0.10 per query in USDChttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/docs
- —Payment via x402 (USDC on Base L2) or MPP (USDC on Tempo)https://pubmed.sekgen.xyz
- —The documented weekly spike endpoint is /api/v1/hottest-weekly, not /api/v1/hottesthttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/docs
- —Pairs with Anthropic's PubMed MCP for trend-to-abstract workflowshttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz
- —Supports both PubMed (MeSH-based) and OpenAlex (free-text) data sourceshttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/docs