pygetpapers | Automated Retrieval of Open Access Scientific Literature

25 Feb, 2026 by RK

Release Category: Production

Developed By: Ayush Garg

pygetpapers is a tool to download papers and metadata from open-access repositories. It makes requests to open access scientific text repositories, analyses the hits, and systematically downloads the articles without further interaction.

It has been developed by Ayush Garg under the guidance of the OpenVirus community and Peter Murray Rust and Rik Smith-Unna funded by ContentMine.

It comes with the packages pygetpapers and download tools which provide various functions to download, process and save research papers and their metadata.

We use pygetpapers for querying current and past scholarly literature in bulk.

Primary functionality:

Query and download from Europe PMC, bioRxiv, medRxiv, Crossref, OpenAlex, Redalyc, SciELO, Upspace.
Output: timestamped directories under ~/pygetpapers/ (or custom path) with per-article folders.
Optional: XML fulltext, PDF, HTML; CSV of results; DataTables HTML + JSON for interactive browsing.

Primary inputs:

Query string, API/repository choice, limit, date ranges, flags (e.g. --xml, --pdf, --makecsv, --datatables).

Primary outputs:

Directories: {output_root}/{repo}_{timestamp}/ with {paper_id}/ subdirs.
Files: fulltext.xml, fulltext.pdf, fulltext.html, fulltext.pdf.html (when requested); eupmc_result.json / *_result.json per article; eupmc_results.json (or repo-specific) at project level; *_papers_data.json for DataTables; datatables.html; CSV when --makecsv.

Main file types for transfer: .xml, .pdf, .html, .json, .csv.

Installation

Use the code pip install pygetpapers to install pygetpapers

Check the successful installation with command : pygetpapers --help. You should see a help message come up.

Code Repository - github
README file of pygetpapers : pygetpapers/README.md

Tutorials (Jupyter Notebook/ Colab Notebook and video demo)

hackathon

← Back