How Biodiversity PMC can support literature search for biodiversity research ?

The volume of scientific literature is growing at an unprecedented rate, making it increasingly difficult to remain up to date. Traditional bibliographic catalogues such as Web of Science and Scopus, and open alternatives like OpenAlex or Google Scholar, primarily allow searches based on bibliographic metadata and abstracts. This often results in large corpora containing many irrelevant articles or missing crucial works.

Biodiversity PMC, supported by the SIB Literature Services and building on the work of Plazi and also continuously amended with full-text articles from Pensoft’s and and MNHN journals, offers a powerful one-stop search engine for researchers in biodiversity. By enriching bibliographic records with semantic and topic-related metadata, it enables more precise and comprehensive retrieval of biodiversity-related literature.

In this presentation, participants will be introduced to the capabilities of Biodiversity PMC and its advantages over traditional catalogues. They will explore how to conduct targeted searches via the web interface and see how the APIs can be used for programmatic workflows, with demonstrations with Postman. Through guided examples and real-world case studies, the session aims to raise awareness of this resource, showcase the benefits of semantic metadata, and provide participants with practical skills for integrating Biodiversity PMC into their research practice.

The different collections available wihin BiodiversityPMC/SIBilS will be introduced with their specificities (e.g., highly structured semantically riched JATS XML and BioC vs. PDF files in the Biodiversity Literature Repository, hosted by Zenodo). We will also  report on the evaluations performed with the BiodiversityPMC/SIBilS search engine and how it can support the search of supplementary data files, including OCR-ized images, normalized tables (e.g.,  XLS, CSV) and other file types.

By the end of the presentation, attendees will be able to identify when Biodiversity PMC is the most appropriate tool for their needs, confidently perform searches through its web platform, and understand how to access its data programmatically.