Year-by-year PubMed publication trends, growth analytics, and CAGR for any biomedical topic — $0.01/query via x402.
What it does
The PubMed Trends API at pubmed.sekgen.xyz provides programmatic access to publication trend analytics drawn from over 36 million PubMed articles and OpenAlex data. It exposes 11 endpoints covering year-by-year publication counts, multi-term comparisons, emerging topic detection, weekly spike rankings, sub-topic breakdowns, key paper scoring, author profiles, and more. All responses are JSON, designed for LLM agents and data pipelines rather than dashboards.
Payment is per-query via the x402 protocol using USDC on Base L2 (also supports MPP on Tempo). Prices range from $0.01 for a simple trend lookup or snapshot to $0.10 for cross-domain discovery. No API keys or subscriptions are required — an agent sends a standard HTTP request, receives a 402 challenge with payment instructions, signs a USDC transfer, and retries with proof to receive data.
The `/trends` endpoint specifically returns year-by-year publication counts for any PubMed search query, along with computed analytics including CAGR, peak year, trend direction, and acceleration. Optional parameters let you set a custom year range. Other endpoints in the suite let you compare terms head-to-head (`/compare`), detect real-time surges (`/pulse`, `/hottest-weekly`), find emerging niche topics (`/emerging`), discover anomalies across MeSH categories (`/explore`), and retrieve scored key papers with PMIDs (`/keypapers`, `/digest`). Data sources include NCBI PubMed and OpenAlex.
Capabilities
Use cases
- —Weekly automated surveillance of publication activity in a therapeutic area for competitive intelligence
- —Science due diligence on a biotech company's research positioning before investment
- —Grant writing support — populate Significance sections with emerging trend data and key papers
- —Agent-driven literature monitoring that alerts when a topic's publication rate spikes
- —Comparing publication momentum across competing drug modalities (e.g., CAR-T vs bispecific antibodies)
Fit
Best for
- —AI agents needing structured biomedical trend data without API key management
- —Biotech analysts performing rapid scientific due diligence
- —Researchers tracking emerging topics or writing grant proposals
- —Data pipelines that need machine-readable PubMed analytics at low per-query cost
Not for
- —Full-text article retrieval or PDF access (returns counts and metadata, not article bodies)
- —Non-biomedical literature searches (data is scoped to PubMed and OpenAlex biomedical content)
- —High-volume bulk downloads of raw PubMed records (use NCBI E-utilities directly)
Quick start
# Using awal (Coinbase agent wallet CLI)
awal x402 pay 'https://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/api/v1/trends?query=CRISPR&start_year=2018&end_year=2025'
# Or with curl + x402 payment header after obtaining a 402 challenge:
curl -X GET 'https://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/api/v1/trends?query=CRISPR'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 endpoint is live (402 challenge captured), documentation is thorough with parameter tables and example responses for all endpoints, pricing is clearly stated, and the landing page provides use-case examples. No formal OpenAPI schema is published, which prevents a perfect score, but the docs are detailed enough to be functionally equivalent.
Warnings
- —No formal OpenAPI/JSON schema published — endpoint contracts are documented in prose/tables only
- —The probe used POST but docs specify GET for /trends; the endpoint accepted both with a 402 challenge
- —No /pricing or /README pages found (404); all pricing info comes from the landing page and /docs
Citations
- —Provides analytics from 36M+ PubMed articleshttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz
- —/trends endpoint costs $0.01 per queryhttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/docs
- —Payment via x402 protocol using USDC on Base L2, also supports MPP on Tempohttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz
- —11 endpoints ranging from $0.01 to $0.10https://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/docs
- —/trends returns year-by-year counts, CAGR, peak year, trend direction, and accelerationhttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/docs
- —Data sources include NCBI PubMed and OpenAlexhttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/docs
- —x402 challenge detail: Biomedical research publication trends from PubMedhttps://pubmed.sekgen.xyz/api/v1/trends