Europe PMC (https://europepmc.org) is a comprehensive resource of biomedical research publications that offers advanced tools for search, retrieval, and interaction with the scientific literature. This article outlines new developments since 2014. In addition to delivering the core database and services, Europe PMC focuses on three areas of development: individual user services, data integration, and infrastructure to support text and data mining. Europe PMC now provides user accounts to save search queries and claim publications to ORCIDs, as well as open access profiles for authors based on public ORCID records. We continue to foster connections between scientific data and literature in a number of ways. All the data behind the paper - whether in structured archives, generic archives or as supplemental files - are now available via links to the BioStudies database. Text-mined biological concepts, including database accession numbers and data DOIs, are highlighted in the text and linked to the appropriate data resources. The SciLite community annotation platform accepts text-mining results from various contributors and overlays them on research articles as licence allows. In addition, text miners and developers can access all open content via APIs or via the FTP site.

Europe PMC (https://europepmc.org) is a database of research articles, including peer reviewed full text articles and abstracts, and preprints - all freely available for use via website, APIs and bulk download. This article outlines new developments since 2017 where work has focussed on three key areas: (i) Europe PMC has added to its core content to include life science preprint abstracts and a special collection of full text of COVID-19-related preprints. Europe PMC is unique as an aggregator of biomedical preprints alongside peer-reviewed articles, with over 180 000 preprints available to search. (ii) Europe PMC has significantly expanded its links to content related to the publications, such as links to Unpaywall, providing wider access to full text, preprint peer-review platforms, all major curated data resources in the life sciences, and experimental protocols. The redesigned Europe PMC website features the PubMed abstract and corresponding PMC full text merged into one article page; there is more evident and user-friendly navigation within articles and to related content, plus a figure browse feature. (iii) The expanded annotations platform offers ∼1.3 billion text mined biological terms and concepts sourced from 10 providers and over 40 global data resources.

BackgroundAs the availability of open access full text research articles increases, so does the need for sophisticated search services that make the most of this new content. Here, we present a new feature available in Europe PMC that allows selected sections of full text articles to be searched, including figures and reference lists. Users can now search particular parts of an article, reducing noise and allowing fine-tuning of searches.ResultsTo the best of our knowledge, Europe PMC is the first service that provides a granular literature search by allowing users to target their search to particular sections of articles. This new functionality is based on a heuristic algorithm that identifies and categorises article sections into 17 pre-defined categories based on the section heading. The tagger’s performance is measured against a manually curated dataset consisting of 100 full text articles with an F-score of 98.02%.ConclusionsThe section search is available from the advanced search within Europe PMC (http://europepmc.org). The source code is freely available from http://europepmc.org/ftp/oa/SectionTagger/.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13326-015-0003-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.