PubMed Central is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine. PubMed Central usage stats are available to publishers of these journal articles. The usage stats are available as individual XML files for a given journal, month and year.

Required configuration fields

The rake task rake pmc:update fetches the usage stats XML file, parses it, and stores the information as JSON for every article in CouchDB. The pmc source therefore only needs to be updated once a month.

When installing the source, the CouchDB database for PMC has to be created with curl -X PUT database_url, where database_url is the URL stored in the configuration.

ALM Name pmc
ALM Configuration default
ALM Core Attributes id (as doi, pmid and pmcid)
ALM Other Attributes none
Protocol HTTP
Format XML
Rate-limiting unknown
Authentication yes
Restriction by IP Address no
API URL http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/utils/publisher/pmcstat/pmcstat.cgi?year=YEAR&month=MONTH&jrid=JOURNAL&user=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD

Example (excerpt)

<pmc-web-stat>
  <request year="2013" month="10" jrid="plosbiol" issn="1544-9173" eissn="1545-7885"></request>
  <response status="0" collection="PLoS Biol"></response>
  <articles>
    <article id="PMC1043859">
      <meta-data doi="10.1371/journal.pbio.0030060" pmcid="PMC1043859" pubmed-id="15736975" pub-year="2005" volume="3" issue="4" first-page="e60"/>
      <usage unique-ip="3" full-text="1" pdf="1" abstract="0" scanned-summary="0" scanned-page-browse="0" figure="4" supp-data="0" cited-by="0"/>
    </article>
    <article id="PMC1043860">
      <meta-data doi="10.1371/journal.pbio.0030085" pmcid="PMC1043860" pubmed-id="15723116" pub-year="2005" volume="3" issue="3" first-page="e85"/>
      <usage unique-ip="118" full-text="128" pdf="90" abstract="2" scanned-summary="0" scanned-page-browse="0" figure="13" supp-data="0" cited-by="1"/>
    </article>
    <article id="PMC1043861">
      <meta-data doi="10.1371/journal.pbio.0030114" pmcid="PMC1043861" pubmed-id="0" pub-year="2005" volume="3" issue="3" first-page="e114"/>
      <usage unique-ip="4" full-text="4" pdf="0" abstract="0" scanned-summary="0" scanned-page-browse="0" figure="0" supp-data="0" cited-by="0"/>
    </article>
    <article id="PMC1043862">
      <meta-data doi="10.1371/journal.pbio.0030122" pmcid="PMC1043862" pubmed-id="15736988" pub-year="2005" volume="3" issue="4" first-page="e122"/>
      <usage unique-ip="1" full-text="1" pdf="1" abstract="0" scanned-summary="0" scanned-page-browse="0" figure="0" supp-data="0" cited-by="0"/>
    </article>
    <article id="PMC1044830">
      <meta-data doi="10.1371/journal.pbio.0030063" pmcid="PMC1044830" pubmed-id="15736976" pub-year="2005" volume="3" issue="3" first-page="e63"/>
      <usage unique-ip="29" full-text="25" pdf="6" abstract="7" scanned-summary="0" scanned-page-browse="0" figure="0" supp-data="0" cited-by="0"/>
    </article>
    <article id="PMC1044831">
      <meta-data doi="10.1371/journal.pbio.0030064" pmcid="PMC1044831" pubmed-id="15736977" pub-year="2005" volume="3" issue="3" first-page="e64"/>
      <usage unique-ip="10" full-text="10" pdf="2" abstract="0" scanned-summary="0" scanned-page-browse="0" figure="0" supp-data="0" cited-by="0"/>
    </article>
    <article id="PMC1044832">
      <meta-data doi="10.1371/journal.pbio.0030071" pmcid="PMC1044832" pubmed-id="15736978" pub-year="2005" volume="3" issue="3" first-page="e71"/>
      <usage unique-ip="8" full-text="10" pdf="1" abstract="0" scanned-summary="0" scanned-page-browse="0" figure="0" supp-data="0" cited-by="0"/>
    </article>
  </articles>
</pmc-web-stat>

Source Code

The source code is available here.

Further Documentation