Paper summaries

Two endpoints summarise scientific papers from PubMed Central (NCBI).

Summary from a search

POST https://api.prosecaptain.com/api/generate/summary-from-ncbi?token=YOUR_TOKEN

Searches NCBI and immediately returns a summary of the first result that has full text. Nothing is saved.

{
  "query": "mediterranean diet cardiovascular risk",
  "language": "english"
}

Response:

{
  "success": true,
  "summary": "…",
  "source_article": { "title": "…", "authors": "…", "journal": "…", "pub_date": "2025", "pmcid": "PMC1234567", "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1234567/" },
  "search_info": { "query": "…", "total_found": 128, "articles_returned": 10 },
  "processing_time_ms": 23110
}

Queued summary

POST https://api.prosecaptain.com/api/generate/article-summary?token=YOUR_TOKEN

Queues a summary of a specific paper and immediately returns an article_id. Check the result with the article status.

{
  "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1234567/",
  "language": "english"
}

Field	Required	Description
url	yes	Paper URL with a PMC id.
language	yes	Summary language.
article	no	Paper data (title, authors, journal, pub_date, pmcid, fullText, abstract) if you want to provide it instead of fetching from NCBI.

Response:

{
  "success": true,
  "article_id": "6f1c…",
  "status": "queued",
  "message": "Task queued. Worker will create article and generate the summary."
}

The summary is usually ready within a few minutes. Poll the status every 10–15 seconds until queue_status becomes completed or failed.

Errors

Status	code	Description
400	VALIDATION_FAILED, INVALID_URL	Missing fields or a URL without a PMC id.
404	NOT_FOUND, no_articles_found	No full text for the paper, or no search results.
503	WORKER_UNAVAILABLE	The queue is temporarily unavailable. Retry.