Missing Articles

[GMM]

Hello,

Ive noticed that there were some articles in the API that seem to have gone missing. From example:

PMID: 37118568

Title: Grazing pressure on drylands.

first_epmc_index_date: Sat 29 April 2023

first publication date: 1 Jan 2023

journal: nature food.

This was fetched by me the 5th of may of this year.

If you search for the article in google, it exists. But neither pubmed nor europepmc recognizes it anymore. And Im sure that at some point it was in the ueropepmc records because otherwise I would not have stored it. 

[Michael Parkin]

Hello,

Thanks very much for your question. It's rare, but it can be that PubMed assigns a PMID to an article, and then subsequently deletes it from their system.

I have checked our logs, and Europe PMC received this PMID from PubMed on 29 April 23, and deleted it several days later on 07 May 23.

The article definitely still exists on the publisher's site, and I'm puzzled as to why it is not available in PubMed any more. The NLM catalog indicates that PubMed only has selected citations for this journal from 2023 onwards. This article was published online in 2022, but in print in 2023. So there is the possibility that it was mistakenly indexed by PubMed and then later removed. Unfortunately we're not able to confirm the reasoning here, and I'd recommend contacting PubMed for clarification. From what I can see though it looks like an intentional deletion from PubMed.

Kind regards,

Michael

[GMM]

Is there any way of knowing which articles you have deleted any given day? I dont mind having some extra data, but Id like to keep my db as close to epmc as possible

[Michael Parkin]

Apologies for the repeat message, but I neglected to share the response with the wider group. Unfortunately there's no mechanism to identify which articles have been deleted on a given day. We suggest that you fetch the article id list in Europe PMC and compare with yours using the idList response in the API: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/search?query=src:*&resultType=idlist&format=xml

With best wishes,

Michael