bioRxiv / medRxiv Preprint Database

Overview

bioRxiv (biology) and medRxiv (health sciences) are free preprint servers hosting 200,000+ and 50,000+ manuscripts, respectively, before or alongside peer review. The unified REST API provides programmatic access to preprint metadata (title, abstract, authors, category, DOI, version history) without authentication. Preprints are available as PDF and can be retrieved by DOI, date range, or category.

When to Use

• Finding the most current research in fast-moving fields before peer review (e.g., infectious disease during outbreaks)
• Monitoring weekly preprint submissions in a specific discipline category (e.g., bioinformatics, genomics, neuroscience)
• Retrieving metadata and abstracts for a set of bioRxiv DOIs for literature screening
• Building a corpus of preprints to track the preprint-to-publication pipeline
• Checking whether a specific preprint has been updated or published in a peer-reviewed journal
• For peer-reviewed biomedical literature use pubmed-database; for all disciplines use openalex-database

Prerequisites